Senior Platform SRE

Job Title

Senior Platform SRE

Job Description

So, who are we?

IG has been at the centre of retail trading and investment since 1974, when we helped create the market for financial spread betting. Today, we're a FTSE100 fintech operating across five continents, serving over 700,000 clients and handling billions in transactions - built on decades of scale, trust and proof. We didn't pivot to innovation; it's how we've always operated. What that means for the people who work here is real: genuinely complex problems to solve, the technology and resources to tackle them properly, and the kind of scope that’s rare in established businesses. The bar is high - bring a curious and forward-thinking mindset and we'll give you the platform to define what comes next. Join us at IG – the future gets built here.

Your team

The Platform SRE team is the engine of IG’s reliability programme. We sit within Infrastructure & Operations, working across IG’s hybrid estate of on-premises HashiCorp Nomad and AWS.

We are not a reactive ops team. We build the platform, standards, and tooling that make reliability the default for every engineering team at IG. Through the SRE Guild, we connect with Domain SREs and Reliability Champions across the organisation, setting the bar and lifting it together.

Your role in the Team's Success

You will be a hands-on technical contributor at the heart of the Platform SRE team, owning pieces of the reliability platform that hundreds of engineers depend on. You will work at the intersection of software engineering, observability, and systems reliability, turning reliability from a reactive concern into a proactive engineering discipline.

You will partner with Platform Engineering, product teams, and Reliability Champions to define what good looks like in production and then make it the default. You will contribute to the SRE Guild, mentor engineers across the organisation, and when things go wrong, you will be on the call helping to mitigate, understand, and prevent a repeat.

What you'll do

Build and own the reliability platform

  • Implement comprehensive monitoring and observability using OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing. Maintain SLO, error budgets and burn-rate tracking

  • Establish and maintain 24/7 operational readiness including automated deployments, blue/green releases, and zero-downtime patching strategies

  • Engineer self-healing capabilities: auto-remediation, error-budget-gated rollback, and automated traffic rerouting

  • Design and run chaos experiments across the AWS estate, turning severe-but-plausible failure scenarios into engineering improvements

  • Build automation tools and CI/CD pipelines that embed reliability practices, while applying software engineering discipline including version control, code reviews, and testing.

  • Contribute to the SRE AI agent, IG’s agentic tooling for incident investigation and reliability review, built on AWS frontier models

  • Mentor junior SREs and Reliability Champions on reliability patterns and production engineering discipline

Set and uphold standards

  • Author and evolve the SRE standards that underpin the Guild: SLO methodology, error budget policy, observability instrumentation guide, and Production Readiness Review (PRR) checklist

  • Mentor developers on reliability patterns including circuit breakers, retry logic, and fault tolerance

  • Work with development teams and Reliability Champions to design SLOs on customer journeys rather than per-service.

  • Assist and guide teams in system design, capacity planning, architectural reviews and closing observability gaps.

Own incident response and learning

  • Facilitate blameless post-incident reviews (PIRs) within five working days using contributing-factor methodology

  • Maintain the Lessons Register, track remediation actions to closure, and surface patterns across incidents quarterly

What you'll need for this role

Essential Technical Skills

  • Observability and instrumentation: hands-on OpenTelemetry experience (spans, metrics, traces, context propagation) and production use of Honeycomb, Datadog, Dynatrace, or Grafana; able to instrument Java or Python services directly.

  • SLOs and error budgets: proven track record designing customer-meaningful SLIs, setting error budgets, configuring multi-window burn-rate alerts, and working with development teams on reliability measurement

  • CI/CD and release engineering: experience building pipelines with safety mechanisms: blue/green and canary releases, automated rollback, and DORA metrics integration

  • Container orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, or GKE) required; HashiCorp Nomad is a strong advantage on IG’s hybrid estate; solid understanding of cloud networking and IaC (Terraform preferred)

  • Software engineering: production-quality coding in Java and/or Python; comfortable contributing to application codebases to implement reliability patterns, not just configuring infrastructure around them

  • Distributed systems: strong understanding of how large-scale systems fail and how to make them fail safely; circuit breakers, bulkheads, idempotency, graceful degradation, and load-shedding; high-throughput, low-latency environments preferred

  • Incident management: on-call experience on production systems, blameless PIR facilitation, contributing-factor analysis, and driving action items to closure; PagerDuty and ServiceNow familiarity helpful

  • Chaos engineering: experience designing and executing hypothesis-driven experiments with blast-radius controls and gap-to-impact-tolerance analysis; AWS FIS, Gremlin, or equivalent

  • Community and standards: at ease in a guild or community-of-practice model; comfortable writing RFCs, presenting at engineering forums, and building standards that others will adopt

Experience Requirements

  • Track record in high-throughput, production environments (financial services, trading platforms, or similar mission-critical systems preferred)

  • Demonstrated ability to improve system reliability and performance at scale

  • Experience working collaboratively with development teams to implement observability and reliability improvements

  • Strong troubleshooting skills in distributed systems environments

Core Competencies

  • Systems thinking approach to problem-solving

  • Excellent communication skills for cross-functional collaboration and technical enablement

  • Ability to balance hands-on development work with operational responsibilities

  • Strong bias toward automation and eliminating manual toil

How we work

We try to take a thoughtful approach to our ways of working as a company. We follow a hybrid working model with 3 days in the office -- which we think balances the need to collaborate effectively and connect with each other. When it comes to how we deliver, there are 5 things we want everyone to do to drive high performance, better learning and career satisfaction:

  • Lead and Inspire: Drives trust, alignment, and enthusiasm
  • Think Big: Focus on the problems that most impact commercial outcomes
  • Champion the client: Understand and prioritise client's needs
  • Deliver at pace: Push for fast, sustainable growth;
  • Raise the bar: Take ownership, be accountable and share feedback

We believe that diversity is vital to success, it fuels creativity, drives innovation and sets us up for global success. We're committed to building teams with a variety of perspectives and skills to help us realise our vision and strategy, that's why we encourage applications from people with diverse backgrounds and experiences to join us on this journey. Learn more about our D&I approach here.

The Perks

Your growth fuels our success! Thrive with tailored development programs, mentoring opportunities with leaders, and clear career progression. Expand your network through committees, sports and social clubs. Enjoy extra time off for volunteering and community work.

Learn more about the Perks here!

Join us for this exciting journey. Apply now!

Number of openings

1