Head of Cloud Hosting & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Head of Cloud Hosting & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Hybrid – Attached to our Solihull, London or Hook office  
Full Time, Permanent   
Band 3 / £80,000 - £95,000 (dependent on experience) 

Here at Serco, we’re at Serco, we’re looking for a Head of Cloud Hosting & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to take ownership of the strategy, delivery, reliability, performance, and continuous improvement of our cloud hosting platforms and SRE practices across the organisation.

We’ve already laid strong foundations - now we’re at the point where real momentum is building. This is an exciting opportunity for someone to step in, elevate what’s in place, and drive the next phase of innovation, scale, and engineering excellence.

This role combines Hybrid Cloud Product Ownership with SRE leadership to ensure that cloud platforms, hosting environments, and critical production systems are highly available, secure, cost-optimised, resilient, and engineered for growth.

You will define and execute the cloud hosting vision, lead high-performing cross-functional engineering teams, and embed SRE principles across Digital Services. Acting as the senior authority, you’ll shape hybrid cloud architecture, automation, incident response, observability, and operational excellence.

This role is pivotal in modernising hosting platforms, improving service stability, and unlocking productivity across the business - with the scope to truly transform how we build, run, and scale our platforms.

As part of this you’ll:

• Define, own, and communicate the cloud hosting vision, roadmap, and architecture across hybrid cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises)
• Ensure platforms are secure, scalable, cost-efficient, and aligned to business and compliance requirements
• Oversee lifecycle management of the hybrid cloud estate, including capacity planning, upgrades, patching, and decommissioning
• Establish and mature Site Reliability Engineering practices, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, observability, and incident management
• Lead automation initiatives to reduce toil and improve delivery speed, efficiency, and reliability
• Act as the escalation point for high-severity incidents impacting production systems and hosting platforms
• Ensure platforms consistently meet reliability, performance, and security standards
• Maintain 24/7 operational readiness, resilience, and effective on-call capabilities
• Drive proactive monitoring, observability, and analytics to identify and resolve issues before customer impact
• Own and prioritise the Hybrid Cloud and SRE product backlog, focusing on value, stability, and risk reduction
• Define KPIs and performance metrics, driving continuous improvement across cloud and SRE services
• Maintain architectural standards, technical governance, and documentation for cloud hosting environments
• Ensure compliance with regulatory, security, and organisational requirements
• Proactively identify, assess, and mitigate risks, vulnerabilities, and architectural weaknesses
• Partner with Security teams to enforce consistent policies and best practices across cloud environments
• Lead cloud financial planning, cost optimisation initiatives, forecasting, and reporting
• Implement cost governance practices aligned to consumption patterns and business needs
• Engage and influence senior stakeholders to align hosting and SRE strategy with organisational priorities
• Shape technology direction across business units through strong collaboration and leadership
• Provide coaching, technical leadership, and structured decision-making support to engineering teams

What you’ll need to do the role:

• Deep expertise in hybrid cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and enterprise hosting platforms
• Strong SRE foundation, including observability, automation, SLIs/SLOs, and incident response
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform, Ansible), Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
• Strong understanding of networking and security (firewalls, VPNs, load balancing, cloud security best practices)
• Proven experience delivering modern DevOps and platform engineering practices
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional engineering teams in complex environments
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence at senior levels
• Experience managing budgets, vendors, and multi-team delivery models
• Ability to operate effectively in large, federated organisations and drive transformation
• Extensive experience in cloud engineering, platform engineering, hosting, or SRE
• Proven track record of delivering high-availability, mission-critical services
• Experience defining and executing enterprise-scale cloud and SRE strategies
• Relevant certifications such as AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud certifications
• SRE or DevOps certifications and/or ITIL, SAFe, CSPO (or equivalent)
• SC clearance (or willingness to obtain it)

What we offer:

• Company car
• 5% on target bonus scheme
• Private medical insurance
• Flexible working considered
• Pension – 6%
• Chance to contribute to innovation in the public services
• A company passionate about diversity and inclusion
• Serco discounts which include cinema, merlin entertainment and online shopping discounts, and discounts on mobile phone plans and leisure centre memberships.
• A range of benefits to support the health and wellbeing of you and your family such as Employee Assistance Programme, Simply Health Cash Plans, and more.
• A wealth of career development training to suit your future aspirations. These range from role specific training, leadership coaching, formal study and much more to support you to build your career with Serco.
• A safe and supportive culture.

.

About Serco
At Serco, not only is the nature of the work we do important, everyone has an important role to play, from caring for vulnerable people to managing complex public services.  We are a team of 50,000 people responsible for delivering essential public services around the world in areas including defence, transport, justice, immigration, healthcare and citizen services. We are innovators, committed to redesigning and improving public services for the benefit of everyone.

By joining Serco you will have unlimited access to our Global Employee Networks – SercoInspire (Gender), SercoEmbrace (Multicultural), SercoUnlimited (Disability) and In@Serco (LGBT & Networks). Serco Employee Networks, led by colleagues who are passionate about diversity, inclusion and belonging. 

Apply
Please click on the apply button to complete your application. Occasionally we receive a large volume of applications for our roles and when that happens we sometimes bring the closing date forward, so please apply promptly to avoid disappointment. 

At Serco, we see people first and foremost for their performance and potential. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive organisation that supports the needs of all. As such we will make reasonable adjustments at interview through to employment for our candidates and strongly encourage applications from a diverse candidate pool. We are open to discussions around flexibility and flexible working. We operate a hybrid work structure in many of our business areas. We are proudly Disability Confident Leader employers and holder of the Gold Inclusive Employer Standard. Disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the job will be given the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities at an interview.  For help with your application please contact 0345 010 4000.
 

At Serco we support fair access to employment for those with unspent criminal convictions through the ‘Ban the Box’ pledge (some may be exempt due to the nature of the role and the security clearance required). Please contact our recruitment team directly on 0345 010 4000 to discuss.