SRE Engineering Manager
Civica · Remote
We’re Civica and we make software that helps deliver critical services for citizens all around the world. From local to state government, to education, to health and care, over 5,000 public bodies across the globe use our software to help provide critical services to over 100 million citizens.
Our aspiration is to be a GovTech champion everywhere we work around the globe, supporting the needs of citizens and those that serve them every day. Building on 21 years of continuous growth and success, we're at a pivotal point on our journey to realise that aspiration.
At Civica, we are reshaping how public sector software is built and run. Shifting our portfolio of citizen-focused products to a fully cloud-native, SaaS operating model.
We are seeking an experienced SRE Engineering Manager to help lead this evolution: driving operational excellence across our Engineering and LiveOps teams, and embedding reliability, performance, and security into everything we deliver for education, health and care, and local government customers.
Why you will like the SRE Engineering Manager role
The work is complex and high stakes; but it is also an opportunity to solve real-world problems at scale, alongside a team that values inquisitive minds, blameless approach, keeping things simple and automated, celebrating success, and learning from mistakes.
- Delivering reliability improvements: In collaboration with our Principal SRE engineer and LiveOps teams, implement and iterate on SRE practices across your team, delivering measurable improvements in availability, performance, and incident response.
- Connecting engineering and operations: Partner with Platform and LiveOps to build and run solutions that scale securely and efficiently.
- Implementing observability: Instrument services with metrics, tracing, and logging through our observability stacks, creating shared visibility across teams.
- Running incident response: Support on-call readiness, run blameless post-mortems, and feed lessons back into engineering and product planning.
- Building automation and standardisation: Implement and improve our IaC and CI/CD practices (Terraform, GitHub Actions, Ansible, Packer, Kubernetes), delivering reusable, auditable patterns.
- Experienced in establishing and evolving core SRE practices - including SLOs, on-call structures, toil reduction, and production readiness and adapting them to the maturity and needs of the organisation.
- Hands-on technical leadership: Get into the code and the systems. Review architecture proposals, prototype reliability solutions, debug complex production issues with your team, and make technical calls on trade-offs between speed, resilience, and cost.
- Technical debt and prioritisation: Identify systemic reliability risks, make the case for addressing them, and ensure technical debt doesn't quietly erode service quality.
- People leadership: Mentor engineers, nurture psychological safety, and foster curiosity and accountability within your team.
- Security and Governance: Collaborate with our Security and Compliance teams to integrate resilience and regulatory requirements (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI) into design and delivery.
Requirements
- Proven experience leading SRE, DevOps, or Cloud/Software engineering teams (typically 5+ engineers) within a SaaS or complex multi-product environment.
- Strong technical foundation in cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP, or equivalent) and hybrid or cloud migration patterns.
- You can read and review application and infrastructure code, not just delegate it. Comfortable writing automation, debugging distributed systems issues, and making architecture decisions grounded in hands-on experience.
- Solid background in observability tooling and incident management practices, including monitoring, tracing, and alerting. You've used data from these systems to diagnose real production problems, not just configured dashboards.
- Excellent communicator and facilitator. Able to work across Product, Platform, Security, Support and LiveOps stakeholders.
- Skilled mentor who builds clarity, alignment, and confidence in engineers.
- Passionate about reliability and user experience as a culture, not just a function. Embedding SRE principles within your team and across the teams you support.
Nice to haves:
- Experience with large-scale multi-tenant SaaS or hybrid cloud migrations.
- Awareness of ITIL or incident command frameworks adapted for modern SRE cultures.
- Familiarity with multiple observability ecosystems (Grafana, Datadog, ELK, Prometheus).
- Experience working with distributed global teams.
- Experience working in software development and strong familiarity with software lifecycle.
Benefits
Why You'll Love Working with Us
As a company, we're passionate about what we do and the citizens we serve. If you, too, want to champion the use of technology in public services to improve outcomes for citizens and public sector organizations, then Civica is the right place for you. We will help you unlock the best version of yourself, achieve career growth, and make a real difference to people and communities.
We know that when our people are happy, they work better and have greater job satisfaction. Here's what you can expect:
Time Off & Work-Life Balance
- 25 Days Annual Leave + bank holidays – plus the option to buy up to 10 extra days!
- Days of Difference – Up to 3 extra days off for volunteering.
Financial Well-being & Security
- Pension Contributions – 5% employer match to support your future.
- Income Protection – Up to 75% salary cover for long-term illness.
- Life Assurance – 4x salary tax-free lump sum.
- Critical Illness Cover – £25,000 lump sum (extendable to dependents).
Health & Perks
- Private Medical Insurance – Fast access to private healthcare.
- Health Cash Plan – Claim back physio, therapies & more.
- Dental Insurance – Cover for routine & emergency care.
- Affinity Groups – Join employee-led communities.
- Bounty Bonus – Refer a friend & get rewarded.
At Civica, we are committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace where everyone feels valued and supported. We believe that a variety of perspectives drives innovation and excellence, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds, cultures, and experiences.
We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other legally protected characteristic. Our recruitment process is designed to ensure fairness and transparency, so every candidate has an equal chance to contribute to our mission.
If you need any adjustments or accommodations to participate in our recruitment process, please let us know. We are here to support you.