Lead Site Reliability Engineer, Cancer Research
£64-74k
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
Python
Linux
Terraform
Splunk
ELK
Ansible
Prometheus
Grafana
Unix
Datadog
Senior and Expert level
London
More information about location
1-2 days a week in office (Stratford, London)
Cancer prevention, awareness and research charity
Be an early applicant
Cancer prevention, awareness and research charity
1001+ employees
HealthcarePersonal healthCharitySocial ImpactMedTech
Be an early applicant
£64-74k
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
Python
Linux
Terraform
Splunk
ELK
Ansible
Prometheus
Grafana
Unix
Datadog
Senior and Expert level
London
More information about location
1-2 days a week in office (Stratford, London)
1001+ employees
HealthcarePersonal healthCharitySocial ImpactMedTech
Company mission
To prevent, control and cure cancer through ground-breaking research.
Role
Who you are
- Proven experience as a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, operating and improving large‑scale production systems across complex on‑premise and AWS cloud environments
- This includes troubleshooting performance issues, managing incidents, conducting post-mortems, and implementing lasting solutions that prevent recurrence
- Expert in SRE best practices with strong AWS experience and a proven record of improving reliability and reducing toil through engineering solutions across networking, storage, databases, and platform services
- Experience automating operational tasks and delivering self‑service capabilities using infrastructure as code and CI/CD tooling (e.g., Terraform, AWS CDK, Ansible, CloudFormation, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)
- Effectively troubleshot and debugged Linux/ Unix systems using Python in line with security best practices
- Strong observability experience (including Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Splunk, Datadog, or CloudWatch), with the ability to design effective monitoring, alerting, and dashboards
- Proficiency with containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS/Fargate) and a solid understanding of microservices, distributed systems, and service mesh technologies
- Background in leading engineering teams, with strong management and coaching skills and the ability to drive change and guide people through ambiguity and evolving business needs
- Has successfully built credible and collaborative technical and non-technical stakeholder relationships with the ability to explain complex technical issues, balance competing priorities, and influence technical decisions
What the job involves
- We are professionals with purpose, beating cancer every day. But we need to go much further and much faster. That’s why we’re looking for someone talented, someone who wants to develop their skills, someone like you
- Cancer Research UK has an ambitious Engineering Strategy supported by a modern Tech Stack and a complex hybrid infrastructure spanning on‑premise and multi‑cloud environments
- As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you’ll play a vital role in shaping and advancing SRE practices across the charity. You’ll lead incident response, drive automation to reduce operational toil, and act as the escalation point for complex production issues. You’ll define meaningful Service Level Objectives, strengthen observability, and help foster a blameless, learning‑focused culture that continually improves reliability
- You’ll also lead and develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers, balancing day‑to‑day operational needs with engineering work that delivers long‑term improvements. Working closely with development teams and Platform Engineering colleagues, you’ll embed SRE principles across our services, coaching engineers and influencing technical direction to ensure reliability is built in from the start
- If you’re an SRE leader who has strengthened large‑scale production systems across complex on‑premise and AWS environments, and you’re passionate about developing and leading teams to drive meaningful change, we would love for you to join our mission
- Ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of Cancer Research UK’s production services across AWS, on‑premise, and data centre environments. This includes:
- Defining and monitoring Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and reliability metrics
- Reducing incidents and operational toil through automation, engineering improvements, and continuous optimisation
- Leading incident response, promoting a blameless culture, coordinating cross‑team response, and ensuring post-mortem and follow‑up actions drive long‑term improvement
- Building and maintaining comprehensive monitoring, logging, alerting, and tracing capabilities
- Creating tools and dashboards that give teams clear visibility into system health, performance, and reliability and help them proactively identify issues
- Collaborating closely with development teams, architects, and Platform Engineering colleagues to embed reliability, observability, and operability into service design
- Advising on scalability, performance, capacity planning, and production readiness at scale
- Driving automation and toil reduction through infrastructure as code, robust CI/CD pipelines, self‑service tooling, and the removal of manual operational tasks
- Collaborating with the Head of Platform Engineering and peers to shape SRE strategy and practices across the organisation
- Championing the adoption of SRE principles (including SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, and the balance between reliability work and feature development)
- Using modern platform approaches (LaaS, PaaS, FaaS, containers, serverless) to balance reliability, agility, and cost‑effectiveness
- Producing and maintaining high-quality documentation, ensuring production systems are understood, debugged, and operated by the team and promoting knowledge sharing
- Defining and championing best practices for reliability, observability, incident management, and operational excellence across the organisation
- Line Management:
- Line-managing and leading the SRE team (c.5 direct reports), coaching them to develop their skills and careers
- Creating an inclusive and high-performing team culture that recognises success and retains talent within the team and wider function
- Setting clear objectives and KPIs for the team
- Balancing operational demands with engineering work to ensure the team can invest in automation, reliability improvements, and skills development
- Mentoring engineers across Platform Engineering and development teams to strengthen operational capability and adopt SRE best practices
- Supporting self‑service initiatives while ensuring strong governance around reliability, security, and cost management
Application process
- Closing date: 16 February 2026 23:55
Salary benchmarks
Our take
The world’s largest independent cancer research charity, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) was founded from a merger between the Cancer Research Campaign and the Cancer Research Fund in 2002. CRC and ICRF had been longstanding pinnacles of the British medical institution, their work dating back to 1902 and 1923 respectively, and the merger signalled a strong step forward for UK medical institutes’ global influence.
A multi-armed charity, CRUK uses both grant-funded researchers and its own employed staff to research the treatments and causes of cancer, whilst its striking advertising and marketing campaigns are responsible for influencing public policy on the causes, prevention, and treatment of the disease. An example of a significant public campaign was Stoptober, which appeared to have triggered a third of a million smokers at the time to try quit tobacco throughout the month of October.
Alongside its pharmaceutical efforts, in 2023 CRUK funded clinical trials for the first-ever proton beam therapy for breast cancer, indicating a focus on technological innovations in the fight against cancer. On this subject, CRUK has also taken part in a billion-pound investment in the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research institute that is aiming to make England an international leader in the industry.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Led by a woman
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Health & Wellbeing - Health and wellbeing are important to us. We want our people to have time away from work to support their different commitments, needs and interests
- Our occupational health and mental wellbeing support are accompanied by online health assessment tools, Our confidential employee assistance programme is available to all to provide support for any concerns in your work or personal life for ongoing everyday support or free counselling if you need it. We also have a team of Mental Health First Aiders supporting across the organisation
- Our occupational health and mental wellbeing support are accompanied by online health assessment tools, Our confidential employee assistance programme is available to all to provide support for any concerns in your work or personal life for ongoing everyday support or free counselling if you need it
- We also have a team of Mental Health First Aiders supporting across the organisation
- UK-wide savings - Our staff have access to a wide range of discounts, benefits and cashback deals to support you with your financial wellbeing, through our Rewards platform. We offer an online savings and discounts portal covering many widely recognised retailers and brands from electronics, groceries, home and leisure, holidays and more
- Cancer Research UK staff can take advantage of savings through a cycle to work scheme, or an interest free loan to help spread the cost of travel season tickets. Staff also enjoy great benefits in and around our head office in Stratford, London with deals at local shops, bars and restaurants
- Income Protection and Life Assurance - We provide all staff with free insurance policies, paying 50% of your salary if you are unable to work through illness, and up to 4 times your salary for your beneficiaries should the unthinkable happen and you die while in our employment
- Flexible Working - We want our people to have time away from work to support their different commitments, needs and interests. We encourage a flexible working culture, including options such as home-working, reduced or flexi-hours, job shares, job-splits, compressed and core hours
- We offer a high level of flexibility for the vast majority of our office-based roles, meaning that you’ll only be required to work from a specific location for 1 or 2 days a week on average
- Annual Leave - For the majority of our roles we offer 25 days holiday a year plus bank holidays, and an extra day for Christmas Eve. You can choose to use the religious bank holidays flexibly. On top of this, you can choose to buy up to 1 week’s additional holiday each year
Company HQ
Stratford, London, UK
Leadership
Previously Non-Executive Director of NHS England for 4 years, and Chief Executive of the MS Society for 5 years.
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