SRE Tech Lead

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) will take end-to-end ownership of the ISP’s internal core infrastructure that powers our ISP, cloud, and hosting platforms. This role operates with high autonomy and requires someone who can design, build, maintain, and scale internal tools and services with minimal day-to-day oversight.

You will develop production-grade tooling (primarily in Go and Python), integrate internal systems with third-party APIs, expose APIs for internal consumption, and ensure the platforms we build are secure, observable, reliable, and high-performing. This is a builder role: you will own the systems you create, drive improvements across reliability and automation, and enable our network, cloud, and engineering teams to operate efficiently without compromising uptime, scalability, or security.

Infrastructure Ownership & Reliability

• Own and operate core internal infrastructure supporting ISP, cloud, and hosting platforms.
  
• Maintain, improve, and extend existing internal systems with a strong reliability and observability focus.
  
• Ensure services are scalable, secure, highly available, and well-instrumented.
  

Tooling & Service Development

• Design, build, and run internal tools and services, primarily in Go and Python.
  
• Integrate with third-party APIs using REST/JSON and webhooks.
  
• Develop and expose HTTP/JSON APIs for internal systems.
  
• Select, implement, and operate open-source and self-hosted solutions where practical.
  

• Lead automation initiatives to reduce manual effort (toil) and streamline infrastructure operations.
  
• Drive standardisation of tools, documentation, and operational processes.
  

• Ensure strong monitoring, alerting, and observability across systems.
  
• Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and performance troubleshooting.
  
• Maintain documentation such as runbooks, architecture notes, and troubleshooting guides.
  

Collaboration & Support

• Work closely with cloud, network, and development teams to provide stable internal platforms.
  
• Support the ongoing operation of services you build, including participation in an on-call rotation for critical infrastructure.
  

Requirements

• Strong ownership mindset with a focus on identifying and solving root-cause issues.
  
• Solid Linux system administration experience (Debian/Ubuntu preferred).
  
• Experience in SRE, Infrastructure, Operations, or Platform Engineering roles.
  
• Production experience building and maintaining tooling/services in Go and/or Python.
  
• Ability to integrate with third-party APIs and expose internal APIs.
  
• Comfortable using Git-based workflows, pull requests, and code reviews.
  
• Understanding of distributed systems and high-availability design principles.
  
• Intermediate knowledge of protocols such as DNS, NTP, HTTP, TLS, and TCP/IP.
  

• Understanding of routing protocols: BGP, OSPF, route reflectors, IP anycast, MPLS.
  
• Experience in ISP, telecoms, or high-uptime environments.
  

Security, Encryption & Secrets Management

• Experience with GPG, asymmetric encryption, or SOPS.
  

Observability & Monitoring

• Prometheus, Alertmanager
  
• Loki, Grafana
  
• Zabbix
  
• Custom exporters and instrumentation
  

Linux Internals & Performance

• Deep understanding of Linux processes, networking stack, filesystems.
  
• Performance debugging across application, OS, and network layers.
  

Configuration Management & IaC

• Experience with SaltStack (ideal), Ansible, Terraform, Helm, GitOps workflows.
  

Edge & Web Services

• Experience with Nginx, Traefik, pm2, or similar reverse proxies and load balancers.
  

DNS

• Experience with PowerDNS (Authoritative/Recursor), dnsdist, CoreDNS.
  

You don't need to know all of these on day one, but you should be comfortable learning them:

• Debian, Ubuntu, systemd
  
• Docker, k3s/Kubernetes, Helm
  

Networking & DNS

• FRRouting (BGP/OSPF, route reflectors), anycast DNS
  
• RADIUS
  
• PowerDNS, dnsdist
  

Web / Edge

• Nginx, Traefik, pm2
  
• PHP, Django, Node
  

Configuration & IaC

• SaltStack
  
• GitHub, GitHub Actions
  
• SOPS, GPG
  

Observability

• Prometheus, Alertmanager
  
• Loki, Grafana
  
• Zabbix
  

Data Stores

• PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB
  
• Redis, Consul
  

Containers & Orchestration

• Docker, k3s/Kubernetes, Helm.
  

Release Engineering

• Experience building CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions preferred).
  

Documentation

• Ability to write internal documentation, RFCs, or technical notes.
  

Benefits

• Medical Aid (Discovery)
  
• Reduced Gap Cover Rates (Turnberry Premier)
  
• Retirement Annuity Contribution (Allan Gray)
  
• Medical Insurance (Momentum - Health4Me)
  
• Discounted Internet Connectivity
  
• Free Employee Wellness Programme (Lyra Wellbeing, formerly ICAS)
  
• Exposure to latest industry technologies and standards
  
• Lastly, a work environment that rivals the very best!