SRE Staff Engineer

About the job

Join Us

At Vodafone, we’re not just shaping the future of connectivity for our customers – we’re shaping the future for everyone who joins our team. When you work with us, you’re part of a global mission to connect people, solve complex challenges, and create a sustainable and more inclusive world. If you want to grow your career whilst finding the perfect balance between work and life, Vodafone offers the opportunities to help you belong and make a real impact.

The SRE Staff Engineer will lead the adoption of Site Reliability Engineering across SMA, enabling teams to move from traditional platform management towards a proactive, engineering-led approach to reliability, resilience and platform quality.

The role has overall accountability for the operational health and reliability of the SMA platform estate, ensuring platforms operate correctly, meet agreed Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and maintain appropriate standards of resilience, supportability and technical quality. This includes driving the management of technical debt, lifecycle risks and reliability improvements across enterprise-scale SaaS, on-premises, cloud and hybrid platforms.

As an SRE evangelist and technical leader, the role will establish direction, influence engineering practices and bring teams on the SRE journey. Working closely with the DevOps Engineering Manager, development teams and data teams, it will ensure the wider SMA organisation delivers customer expectations through consistent platform quality and resilient services.

The role will line manage the Operations Manager and four DevOps-focused engineers. It retains overall accountability for platform incident management, while delegating operational coordination and response activities appropriately. Targeted hands-on contribution will support complex problem-solving and demonstrate engineering approaches, rather than being the role’s primary focus.

What you’ll do

SRE leadership and adoption

• Set the SRE direction and roadmap across SMA, evolving platform management into sustainable reliability engineering.
• Champion SRE principles through practical guidance, coaching and measurable improvements.
• Build shared ownership of reliability across platform, DevOps, development and data teams.
• Establish consistent SRE practices across SaaS, on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments.

Platform health, resilience and quality

• Maintain accountability for the reliability, resilience and technical quality of SMA platforms.
• Provide a consistent view of platform health, operational risks, dependencies and improvement priorities.
• Ensure technical debt, lifecycle risks, capacity constraints and resilience gaps are identified and addressed.
• Set standards for observability, recovery, supportability and production readiness.

SLOs and reliability governance

• Define meaningful SLOs, SLIs and error budgets with platform owners and engineering teams.
• Ensure teams monitor service health, understand SLO risks and implement corrective improvements.
• Lead reliability reviews to inform engineering priorities.
• Balance customer expectations, delivery commitments and operational risk.

Incident and operational leadership

• Own overall accountability for incident management, service restoration and corrective actions.
• Delegate operational response to the Operations Manager and technical leads while maintaining oversight.
• Lead technical oversight of significant incidents and ensure clear escalation and ownership.
• Use blameless incident reviews to prevent recurrence and address underlying technical debt.

Engineering enablement and people leadership

• Line manage the Operations Manager and four DevOps engineers, providing direction, coaching and development.
• Strengthen SRE capability through mentoring, technical guidance and knowledge sharing.
• Improve collaboration, handovers and platform support knowledge across teams.
• Enable teams to own operational improvements and routine technical decisions.

Cross-team delivery and collaboration

• Partner with the DevOps Engineering Manager, development and data teams to align reliability priorities and engineering capacity.
• Embed reliability and supportability into platform design, delivery and operational acceptance.
• Establish clear responsibilities and shared outcomes across engineering and operations.
• Ensure reliability improvements are prioritised alongside new capabilities and platform delivery.

Who you are

• Bachelor/Master's Degree in Computer Science or relate field;
• Previous experience working in an SRE role, with a strong grounding in DevOps and platform operations;
• Experience leading reliability and operations in a complex, enterprise-scale, multi-platform environment;
• Experience supporting a mixed estate of SaaS, on-premises, cloud and hybrid platforms;
• Demonstrable experience leading SRE adoption and helping teams transition from traditional platform management;
• Practical experience implementing SLOs, SLIs, error budgets and measurable reliability improvements;
• Strong technical understanding of cloud infrastructure, Linux/Unix, networking, infrastructure as code, CI/CD and observability;
• Experience managing platform incidents, technical debt, operational risks and resilience improvements;
• Ability to set technical direction, review designs and contribute directly to complex technical problems when required;
• Experience line managing and developing engineering and operational colleagues;
• Strong influencing and communication skills, with the ability to align distributed platform, development and data teams;
• Security monitoring and analytics platforms, including SIEM, SOAR and logging infrastructure (nice to have);
• Supplier collaboration and operational oversight of SaaS services (nice to have);
• Disaster recovery, resilience testing and production readiness (nice to have);
• Relevant SRE, cloud or DevOps qualifications, or equivalent professional experience (nice to have);
• Fluency in English.

Not a perfect fit?

Worried that you don’t meet all the desired criteria exactly? At Vodafone we are passionate about empowering people and creating a workplace where everyone can thrive, whatever their personal or professional background. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align exactly with every part of the job description, we encourage you to still apply as you may be the right candidate for this role or another opportunity.

What's in it for you

• Hybrid Work Model - Flexible hybrid work model with 8-10 in-office days per month, managed by team leaders;
• Vodafone Products and Services - Employees get a mobile phone, free communication plan, data card, and various discounts on services and products;
• Recognition - Recognition programs for innovative, creative, high-potential employees and exemplary behaviors;
• Health and Well-being - Well-being Program offers nutrition and psychological consultations, webinars, workshops, and discounts on various services and products;
• Learning - Access to Communities of Practice and a customizable digital training platform with high-quality content (namely Harvard Business Publishing, Skillsoft and Speexx);
• Local and International Mobility - Internal recruitment with local and international rotation opportunities across departments and roles.

Who we are

We are a leading international Telco, serving millions of customers. At Vodafone, we believe that connectivity is a force for good. If we use it for the things that really matter, it can improve people's lives and the world around us. Through our technology we empower people, connecting everyone regardless of who they are or where they live and we protect the planet, whilst helping our customers do the same.

Belonging at Vodafone isn't a concept; it's lived, breathed, and cultivated through everything we do. You'll be part of a global and diverse community, with many different minds, abilities, backgrounds and cultures. ;We're committed to increase diversity, ensure equal representation, and make Vodafone a place everyone feels safe, valued and included.