Site Reliability Engineer

Description

Location: Fully remote within the UK, or our London office next to East Croydon Station

Reports to: CTO

Hozah is a tech-led, award-winning company driving change in the parking industry and reimagining urban mobility. Our mission is simple but powerful: to transform parking into a seamless, automated experience, paving the way for smarter, more sustainable cities.

With recent recognition as PayTech Company of the Year, a place among Deloitte’s Top 50 Fastest Growing Tech Companies in the UK, and significant VC/PE investment, we’re one of the fastest scaling companies in the country.

Role Overview

You will be Hozah’s first Site Reliability Engineer, and the person who owns how our platform runs. Our parking and payments systems take money from motorists (pay by web, Autopay, kiosks) and pay it on to landowners, and our ANPR enforcement runs around the clock. Those paths have to stay up and stay correct. You own the platform they run on: GKE and Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform for our Google Cloud organisation and projects, SOPS-encrypted secrets, the Semaphore CI/CD pipelines, Temporal for the ANPR workflows, and Postgres. You also own the reliability practice around it: uptime targets, alerting, on-call, incident response and the cost of running it all.

Product engineers keep ownership of the code in their services. You own the ground it runs on, and you make it easy for them to ship safely. Our engineers use AI coding tools every day, which means more code reaches production each week, so release safety and observability matter more than ever.

This is a new role. We are hiring a senior engineer to own cloud cost, uptime and on-call, set up a proper incident process, and make the platform something engineers trust. You’ll support all of Hozah’s engineering teams, and you’ll work daily with their engineers. The data engineer owns the data warehouse; you’ll work with them, and infrastructure for data still goes through engineering. This is a newly created role with no direct reports.

Responsibilities

• Own the production platform: GKE and Kubernetes, Helm, Postgres, Temporal and the environments (staging and production) and how a change is promoted between them.
• Own uptime and reliability. Agree service level objectives for the money-moving and enforcement paths with the engineers and the business, and alert a named owner when they are at risk.
• Own on-call: the rota, the runbooks and the incident process, including postmortems that lead to changes rather than reports.
• Own observability across Cloud Monitoring, Logging and Trace, so the team finds problems before motorists and clients do.
• Own our infrastructure as code. Everything changes through Terraform and CI, with no console click-ops, including our SOPS-encrypted secrets.
• Own the Semaphore CI/CD pipelines and safe release: rollbacks, progressive rollout and promotion between environments.
• Own cloud cost. Know what we spend and why, reduce it with measured results, and keep it down as volume grows.
• Work with product engineers as a partner and not a ticket queue: help them design for reliability, and review changes that affect production.
• Who we’re looking for
• You’ve owned production reliability for a Kubernetes-based platform (GKE, EKS or AKS) in the last 12 to 24 months, as the person who gets called when it breaks. You can say exactly what you were accountable for and what you personally changed.
• You write and maintain infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform, and you’ve built CI/CD pipelines with safe release: rollbacks and promotion between environments. You can walk through a change of yours that went wrong, what it affected and what you changed afterwards.
• You’ve cut cloud cost with a measured result and kept it down. You can say what you spent before and after, what you changed, and what you checked before you changed it.
• You’ve set up or rebuilt on-call and incident response in a small team: the rota, the runbooks and the postmortems. You can describe the last real incident you handled and what changed because of it.
• You’ve built observability and service level objectives that changed what got fixed, not just dashboards that nobody opened.
• You work with product engineers without becoming a ticket queue. You can describe how you got engineers to take on reliability work themselves.
• You use AI tools sensibly for operations work, and you know where not to. You can describe real recent use and a time you did not trust the output.
• You’re comfortable setting your own priorities in a fast-moving SME, and you’re happy being the only SRE in the company.
• Experience of Google Cloud itself, Temporal, Semaphore or SOPS is welcome, but none of it is required.

Benefits

• Fully remote working within the UK, or a London office next to East Croydon Station if you prefer to be in.
• Sole ownership of the platform and reliability practice, reporting directly to the CTO.
• The chance to build Hozah’s reliability function from a working base as we scale.
• A strong, high performing culture, with genuine influence over how that culture develops as Hozah grows.
• A fully refurbished, modern office, right next to East Croydon Station, open to you whenever you want it (with a fully stocked kitchen, offering free breakfast, lunch and drinks!).