Distinguished Engineer- (Head of Service Reliability Engineering)
HM Revenue and Customs
- Department
- HM Revenue and Customs
- Location
- Newcastle upon Tyne, London, Leeds, Bristol, Telford
- Openings
- 1 post
- Grade
- SCS
- Salary
- £86,000 to £110,000
- Closing
- 4 days left
- Profession
- DDaT
- Contract
- Permanent
- Security clearance
- SC
- Working pattern
- Flexible working, Full-time
Job summary
This is a rare opportunity to shape reliability engineering across one of the UK’s largest and most important digital estates.
Enterprise Live Services (ELS) at HMRC is evolving into a modern, engineering-led organisation - enabling HMRC to deliver change faster while strengthening reliability, resilience and trust.
As Head of Service Reliability Engineering, you will lead a distinct, independent capability spanning services, products and platforms. You will make reliability, operability and observability integral to engineering from the outset.
With enterprise-wide reach and influence, you will set the direction for SRE, raise service maturity and build a lasting capability that enables teams to innovate safely and operate with confidence.
What they’re looking for
- Technical Leadership: Provides senior technical leadership in enterprise-scale Reliability Engineering, with the credibility to influence architecture, set standards and deliver reliability outcomes in complex, regulated environments.
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Leads the adoption of SRE practices by using SLOs, error budgets and reliability metrics to drive measurable improvements in service performance and operational decision-making.
- Observability: Establishes and governs enterprise observability capabilities, using telemetry, dependency mapping and modern monitoring platforms to improve operational insight and decision quality.
- Resilience and Recovery: Designs and embeds resilience practices that validate recovery capabilities, identify operational risks and strengthen service continuity through testing and evidence-based improvements.
- Secure-by-Design Operations: Integrates security and reliability disciplines by using security intelligence, risk indicators and close collaboration with cyber teams to enhance service operability and resilience.
- Cloud and Platform Engineering: Applies deep expertise in cloud-native and platform-based technologies to assess and mitigate reliability risks associated with architecture, platforms and continuous delivery environments.
- Service Maturity and Assurance: Develops and applies service maturity frameworks that use evidence-based assessment to inform risk, investment and operational decisions rather than relying on compliance measures.
- Executive Stakeholder Management: Communicates complex technical risks clearly to senior stakeholders and uses objective evidence to influence strategic decisions at Director and Executive level.
- What an Outstanding Candidate Would Also Bring (Desirable): Brings experience operating in highly regulated environments, shaping engineering standards across organisations, building reliability communities of practice and supporting modern service management approaches.
Job description
The Head of Service Reliability Engineering is accountable for defining, embedding, and continuously raising service reliability engineering capability across HMRC.
Sitting within Chief Engineering & Platform Office (CEPO) and Enterprise Live Services (ELS), the role leads the independent SRE tower, operating as a centre of excellence for reliability, operability, resilience, and observability. The role does not own delivery, platforms, or live operations. Instead, it coaches, challenges, and enables product, platform, and ELS teams to meet enterprise reliability and service maturity expectations using objective, evidence‑based practices.
The role provides strategic leadership and technical authority to ensure that:
- Reliability and operability are designed into services from inception
- Assurance is grounded in observable service behaviour and maturity evidence
- Enterprise standards enable autonomy and speed, rather than acting as delivery gates
- HMRC can demonstrate confidence, auditability, and resilience at scale
Nationality requirements
This job is broadly open to the following groups:
- UK nationals
- nationals of the Republic of Ireland
- nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
- Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service
Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)
Selection process
For Selection Process details please speak to Lawrence Harris
Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.
Practise before you apply
Civil Service panels score every answer against the Success Profiles behaviours at SCS level. Practise STAR answers and get them marked against the same framework.
3 free questions · No card needed
Similar vacancies
- Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (Cyber Strategy, Governance, Risk and Compliance) · Home Office · £90,000+
- Deputy Director Head of Hybrid Cloud Services · Department for Work and Pensions · £86,000+
- Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (Cyber Operations) - PB1 · Home Office · £90,000+
- Lead Analyst for Digital Transformation Group · Department for Work and Pensions · £86,000+
- Deputy Director, IT Service Operations · OFGEM · £81,000+