Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Job Overview

At the heart of everything we do is our vision to change lives every day, and our mission to grow The National Lottery responsibly and champion its impact. We are Allwyn UK, part of the Allwyn Entertainment Group – a multi-national lottery operator with a market-leading presence across the USA (Michigan and Illinois) and Europe, including Czech Republic, Austria, Greece, Cyprus and Italy. While the main contribution of The National Lottery to society is through the funds to good causes, at Allwyn we put our purpose and values at the heart of everything we do. Join us as we embark on a once-in-a-lifetime, large-scale transformation journey by creating a National Lottery that delivers more money to good causes.

Key Responsibilities

• Reliability engineering & technical leadership
• Define and govern SLOs / SLIs / error budgets across critical services
• Lead reliability design reviews across web & mobile platforms, Player Identity & Protection systems, CMS and Geolocation services
• Drive architecture improvements for resilience (failover, degradation, scaling patterns)
• Production operations & incident leadership
• Act as incident commander for major incidents and high-severity events
• Lead 1-in-4 on-call rotation, covering out-of-hours incident diagnosis and peak jackpot proactive monitoring
• Own end-to-end incident lifecycle: Detection → triage → resolution → post-incident review
• Ensure blameless post-mortems with clear remediation ownership
• Observability & service insight
• Define and evolve observability strategy using Splunk, CloudWatch, Grafana, and Quantum Metric
• Standardise alerting quality and signal-to-noise ratio, dashboards aligned to SLOs and customer impact
• Drive correlation between technical signals and user experience
• Automation & platform engineering
• Lead automation of operational processes using Terraform and scripting
• Improve deployment and release safety (CI/CD, progressive delivery patterns)
• Key contributor to transition strategy for ECS → EKS (Kubernetes adoption)
• Reduce operational toil through tooling, self-healing, observability and platform improvements
• Empower Level-1 operational teams with safe, controlled access to the tools they need to operate autonomously
• Capacity & performance engineering
• Own capacity planning for high-concurrency draw events and traffic spikes during jackpots
• Lead performance optimisation: latency reduction, throughput scaling, cost efficiency
• Backlog ownership & reporting
• Own and prioritise the SRE backlog, balancing reliability improvements, technical debt, and automation opportunities
• Produce structured reporting covering SLO performance, incident trends and MTTR, platform health and risk areas
• Collaboration & culture
• Embed SRE practices across engineering teams
• Mentor engineers and SREs on reliability engineering, observability, and incident management
• Promote a culture of automation, measurement, and continuous improvement
• Supporting with thought-leadership and developing long-term SRE roadmap for Digital Operations

Required Qualifications

Technical
Strong experience in cloud environments, ideally AWS (ECS, with exposure or experience in EKS/Kubernetes)
Hands-on experience with Terraform (Infrastructure as Code) and observability stacks (Splunk, CloudWatch, Grafana)
Strong programming skills (Python, Go, or similar)
SRE practices
Proven experience implementing SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, incident management frameworks, and observability strategies
Strong experience in distributed systems troubleshooting

Operational
Experience in on-call production environments
Demonstrated leadership during high-severity incidents

Desirable Experience
Experience migrating container platforms (ECS → EKS/Kubernetes)
Experience supporting high-scale consumer platforms
Familiarity with real-time analytics / customer experience tooling (e.g., Quantum Metric)
Experience in regulated or high-availability environments

About Allwyn UK

At Allwyn, we are dedicated to changing lives and growing the National Lottery responsibly, championing its positive impact on people, places, and the planet. We pride ourselves on innovation and constantly look for new ways to excite our customers. Our aim is to double the weekly £30m generated for charities and good causes in the UK by the end of the first 10-year license.