Lead Site Reliability Engineer

ABOUT ZEGO 🚀 At Zego, we're on a mission to do the good thing, not the insurance thing. Insurance hasn't changed much in over a century. The way we live, work and travel has. We're building the real-time, AI-driven infrastructure that powers innovative insurance, so good drivers get cover that works the way they actually drive. We're not just updating insurance; We're leading the AI evolution in insurance 🤖 For us, AI isn't a line on a roadmap or a buzzword on a slide. It's our operating reality, and it's how we build products that back drivers instead of the old insurance playbook. We don't do things slowly, and we don't do bureaucracy. We back high-performance builders who want ownership, early responsibility and the chance to do the most career-defining work of their lives. You'll get the space to try things, the tools to move fast, and the room to see your ideas reach millions of drivers. Do not take our word for it. Read what Zegons say about us on Glassdoor https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Overview/Working-at-Zego-Insurance-EI_IE1851459.11,25.htm. If you're ready to build the future of insurance, we're hiring. Overview of the Role You will build the Site Reliability Engineering function at Zego, embedding reliability, observability and operational excellence as core engineering concerns - AI is the primary lever for doing that at scale, not a bolt on. - You will be our dedicated SRE, working alongside Systems Engineering and embedded with Product and Engineering across roughly 120 engineers. Teams own their services and their own on-call. You own the framework, the instrumentation and the AI tooling that makes that ownership work. - You will make teams good at running what they build: alert quality over alert volume, runbooks an agent can execute rather than prose that describes, and diagnostics good enough that an engineer or an agent reaches resolution without an SRE in the room. - You will be the primary advocate for reliability with Product and Engineering, making the case with data rather than assertion, so platform health is prioritised alongside delivery commitments. Key Responsibilities - Define and land the reliability standard: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and production readiness criteria that teams apply to their own services, with adoption measured rather than assumed. - Encode standards into automation rather than enforcing them by hand. Guardrails in CI, agents that check reliability and observability posture on pull requests, and safe defaults in shared infrastructure so the reliable path is the easy path. - Build SRE capability on Zego's AI platform, extending our MCP servers and agents, and making the estate legible to them through machine readable runbooks, structured telemetry and diagnostics an agent can act on. - Own observability as a practice, including instrumentation design, signal quality, cardinality and cost. - Raise the standard of incident response end-to-end, from detection and triage through to retrospectives that produce change. Put AI to work where it pays off most, stripping toil out of incidents so responders can focus on judgement - Measure toil, publish it, and remove it through tooling that others can run without you. What you will need to be successful in the Role We are looking for an engineer who lives SRE and DevOps culture, and treats AI tooling as a default part of how the work gets done, not a side experiment. You will engage and empower teams through decisions grounded in data, and you will be as comfortable building with AI as consuming it: extending MCP servers, writing agents, and automating the operational work that would otherwise fill your week. We treat reliability at Zego as a platform capability, so we care more about what you can make repeatable for others than what you can fix yourself. What you’ll bring to the Team - Deep SRE experience: SLI and SLO definition, error budget management, and ownership of incident response through to blameless retrospectives. - Fluency with AI as an engineering tool rather than a chat window: building agents and automation, working with MCP servers or equivalent, and judgement about where an agent can act and where a human stays in the loop. - Strong software engineering in Python, writing tested, maintainable code that other engineers can run and extend. - Observability depth with OpenTelemetry and Datadog. - AWS at scale, and Kubernetes based platforms managed through Infrastructure as Code. Desirable - Istio, Crossplane and ArgoCD. We run all three and will teach the specifics to the right person. - Running ML or AI workloads in production, such as model serving or feature pipelines. We do this at Zego and you would help support it. - Having been a sole delivery owner somewhere, and knowing what that does and does not mean. THE ZEGO WAYS OF WORKING 🏡 Teams work better with time to collaborate and space to get things done. We call it Zego Hybrid: some of us are in our office (central London or Halifax) weekly, others monthly or quarterly. It's about finding the balance between face time and focus that produces great work and a healthy life around it. We also make a point of getting everyone in the same room. Teams come together every quarter, and once a year the whole company does, properly. It's a serious investment and consistently one of the best parts of the year. Here is what the last one looked like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKOYDx6AMxQ. BENEFITS 🎁 💰 Market-competitive salary, benchmarked against your function and reviewed every year. 🏆 Annual performance bonus, linked to company performance and your contribution. 📈 Share options, a real stake in the company and a share in the future you build 🩺 Private medical insurance. 🏖️ Pension, generous holiday, and £1,000 a year to spend on getting to the office or learning something new. 💻 Cutting-edge systems and tools, so you always have what you need to drive your impact. Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? We want to hear from you. Zego, leading the AI evolution in insurance. EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES 🌈 We're an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.