Senior Site Reliability Engineer

ABOUT US What if your work could drive change in a globally established industry, shaping processes that touch every corner of the world? At Forto, we are at the forefront of change, harnessing the power of AI to revolutionise logistics. We want to reinvent digital supply chains to be transparent, frictionless and sustainable. From day one, our mission has been to simplify global trade – creating a seamless and efficient logistics process. YOUR ROLE & MISSION The Site Reliability Engineering team at Forto is responsible for reliability and developer experience. We enable our development teams to write complex business logic by providing best-in-class tooling and infrastructure. We have a production environment based on GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Helm. On top of that, we have self-service tooling written in TypeScript. “You build it, you run it” - our job is to make that real. This is a high-ownership role on a lean team that directly shapes how 70+ engineers build and ship software. If you care about platform quality and want your work felt immediately across an engineering org, this is a great match for you. WHAT YOU WILL DO * Build out our runtime platform as a self-service product that enables our engineering teams to write code, run workloads, and drive engineering culture forward. * Bring software development skills and practices into platform engineering, such as code quality, domain-driven design, and test-driven development. * Own the developer portal and internal platform roadmap, including leading this year's overhaul of our CI/CD pipelines in collaboration with all product teams. * Ensure site reliability by building observability solutions, deployment, and disaster recovery capabilities. * Own reliability standards end-to-end through SLOs and error budgets — shaping how teams balance velocity and risk. * Drive infrastructure cost optimisation across Kubernetes, MongoDB, and Datadog at scale. * Improve our security posture through tooling, compliance work, and partnership with security stakeholders. * Work closely with the entire Engineering function as a steward of platform architecture — embracing new technologies and cleaning up old ones. * Improve developer productivity by working with engineers on platform services and developer tooling. * Serve as a second line of defense for incidents and be the secondary on-call for our developers. REQUIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE * 5+ years in backend or infrastructure engineering, with at least 2 years in an SRE or platform engineering role. * Hands-on experience with GCP/AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Helm in a production environment. * Strong software development background — building frameworks, internal tooling, and infrastructure. * Experience with an observability platform (Datadog or equivalent) at scale — not just dashboards, but alerting strategy, cost management, and SLO instrumentation. * Experience defining and operating SLOs and error budgets as a reliability mechanism, not just as metrics. * Solid understanding of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and a GitOps-first mindset. * Proven track record designing, developing, and troubleshooting complex distributed systems. Don’t fit all of our criteria? That’s okay! We know that you might be hesitant to apply if you don’t meet all our requirements, but here at Forto, we pride ourselves on embracing diverse perspectives and celebrating potential. If you are passionate about this position and the Forto values, please apply anyway. There could be a place for you in this role - or another one that’s a perfect fit!  WHY WORK WITH US? Our team is hard-working, constantly seeking to maximise the impact of their work, but we put our people first, always winning with care. We value efficient systems and swift, direct communication. We want everyone to have their time to speak, so that we can embrace diverse perspectives to help drive towards solutions always.

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology. We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more. We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026. Thought Machine’s Site Reliability Engineers are the guardians of mission-critical systems for the world's most influential financial institutions. As a member of our elite, globally distributed team, you'll be entrusted with running and maintaining the robust production infrastructure that powers our customers' cutting-edge Core Banking and Payments platforms. This is an opportunity to make a tangible impact on the global financial landscape while collaborating with brilliant minds to solve complex engineering challenges. This role will be part of the Site Reliability Engineering team at Thought Machine HQ in London, tackling the challenges of automating complex fleet management operations, mentoring team members, promoting communities of best practice within engineering as well as designing operational processes that provide effective interfaces between Thought Machine and our SaaS customers. The SRE team is deeply involved in tackling the technical challenges of executing Thought Machine’s growth ambitions - expect to be working with senior stakeholders in the organisation and with our customers, and working on programmes and initiatives that are critical to the success of the company. Duties: * Supporting the product engineering teams in building highly fault-tolerant, scalable applications by participating in design discussions, engaging in RFCs and code reviews. * Executing various department strategies - contributing to the design and scoping work for team members around disaster recovery, backup, redundancy and capacity planning activities. * Being part of a global on-call rotation responsible for identifying and fixing bottlenecks in SaaS customer environments. * Regular maintenance of production systems that host Vault products. * Driving the evolution of our SaaS products by defining and designing features that foster exceptional reliability and an unparalleled user experience. * Implementing and regularly testing DR strategies to ensure the highest level of resilience and fault tolerance of the platform. * Maintain and promote high-quality written documentation of assets, processes and runbooks that are used by the team in their day-to-day operations, * Working with your Manager in growing team members in their technical skills as well as their understanding of Vault Products. Requirements: * You have a track record of delivering high-impact projects with focus on long-term scalability, ensuring that human intervention scales sub-linearly with usage growth. * You possess an up-to-date understanding of design patterns relevant to hosting and networking architectures. * You proactively champion product development, driven by a desire to build truly exceptional products, not just solve immediate challenges. * You’re a high-agency individual who can independently drive projects to completion by effectively scaling your individual output with the appropriate delegation of work to team members. * You have a strong background working in either Python, Golang or Java, having used one of these programming languages to execute a significantly sized project or initiative. * You have experience working with Kubernetes or other container orchestration systems. * You have experience with automation/configuration management, e.g. Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Ansible. * You have expertise in one or more of the following areas: Database Administration, Networking, Observability Tools (such as Prometheus, Jaeger) or automation infrastructure. * You have extensive experience working with either GCP or AWS. Benefits: * Highly competitive salary * Pension plan (match up to 5%) * Life insurance - three times annual salary * Competitive maternity (six months fully paid) and paternity leave (four weeks fully paid) * Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time) * 25 days holiday and bank holidays * Flexible working hours * Cycle-to-work scheme * Electric car scheme * Season ticket loan * Access to outstanding learning materials and courses * Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine * All the latest tech you need * Start the day properly with fresh fruit and cereals * Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks * A talented and experienced team as your colleagues * An environment where we encourage learning and progress * Two charity days a year * Weekly food pop-up We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.