Principal Site Reliability Engineer

At a Glance

Us: Fast-growing startup of 100+ people. Remote team, mainly based in the UK. YC alumni (Summer 2019) and Series A funding of 32m$ in 2023. Our mission is to revolutionise how the world learns about people, so people can revolutionise the world. 🚀

You: An enabling leader passionate about driving platform-first initiatives to ensure the scalability, reliability, and performance of our platform.

Salary: £98,000 - £115,00 + bonus + share options

The Role

We are looking for a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to lead Site Reliability at Prolific, focusing on advancing the resilience and scalability of our GCP and AWS environments. You will play a pivotal role in overseeing and enhancing our Kubernetes clusters in GCP, which support our Django application, and in driving the SRE strategic transition to AWS, particularly towards serverless and event-driven architecture.

What you'll be doing

• Strategic oversight of continuous monitoring, maintenance, and optimisation processes for our Django application, ensuring highest levels of performance and reliability.
• Lead the evolution of our cloud Kubernetes estate, focusing on advanced security, reliability, and observability strategies.
• Spearhead infrastructure optimisations and architectural improvements in collaboration with cross-functional teams, addressing complex challenges and ensuring scalability.
• Promote knowledge sharing and reduce silos across teams to strengthen resilience and reduce dependency on key individuals, increasing our Bus Factor.
• Drive hands-on coding and system design improvements, with a focus on Python/Django, to optimise system performance and efficiency.
• Develop comprehensive documentation and training programs to elevate the operability skills of the engineering team and foster a culture of continuous learning.
• Support our Service Delivery response strategies, by being part of an out-of-hours support rota, and collaborating with our Service Delivery Lead to enhance overall service quality.
• Lead security initiatives, addressing emerging threats, ensuring robust compliance, and setting best practices for the organisation.

What you’ll bring

• Extensive experience as a Site Reliability Engineer / Platform Engineer, with proven staff-plus leadership in managing a large-scale enterprise Kubernetes platform in GCP.
• Deep expertise in security, compliance, and cloud architecture best practices.
• A track record of implementing observability-first approaches and familiarity with tools like Datadog.
• Experience in leading out-of-hours incident management and on-call rotations.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor teams, lead strategic initiatives, and drive significant technology transformations.
• Certification in any of the below would be an advantage, but not required
  • GCP Professional Cloud Architect
  • GCP Professional Security Engineer
  • GCP Professional Networking Engineer
  • GCP DevOps Engineer
  • CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator)

What you’ll get

⚖️ Work Life Balance: We’re all looking to strike the right work life balance, and as a remote first company you’re able to work flexibly from home or our dog-friendly co-working space in Shoreditch and Manchester. We also offer 25 days of holiday, plus bank holidays of course, which you can switch with any day of your choosing.

🏡 Family Life: We offer generous maternity, paternity and shared parental leave. Need to pick your child up from school? No Problem. Our flexible working gives you the childcare flexibility you need.

💰 Pension: We offer a salary sacrifice pension with a 3% starting employer contribution.

📈 Share Options: An exciting option to buy shares of Prolific in the future.

🧘 Wellbeing: We care deeply about our employees well-being, that’s why we offer comprehensive Bupa Medicash private health insurance, that disregards medical history. Taxable monthly stipend of £150 in order for you to improve your wellness and remote experience. We want you to have a happy and healthy environment so we offer a £1000 home office budget, along with a Apple MacBook when you start, plus a £200 yearly top-up.

⚰️ Death-in-service: We offer a death-in-service benefit that would pay out 4x of your annual salary.

📚 Learn Grow: Development is important to us, and we want to give all our employees the opportunity to learn. There are many personal growth and career progression opportunities available, as well as mentoring. We also offer a £1000 yearly budget for education, growth and training for you to use at your discretion.

💙 Culture: We’re a friendly bunch here at Prolific; open, transparent and inclusive. Although we’re a remote first company we still love to hang out with each other! We run collaborative quarterly company-wide meets up and team socials (both virtually and in-person), all paid for. Alongside this we offer a £1000 yearly budget for discretionary meet-ups so you can cover travel, food and accommodation. As a business we’re also committed to carbon offsetting; each month we donate money in your name to plant trees 🌳 and being remote we’re doing our bit to offset travel too

Our Interview Process

Talent Call: You'll meet with one of our Talent team and have an exploratory call about the role requirements, life at Prolific, as well as your background and aspirations.