Senior System Engineer

We're looking for an autonomous systems engineer to own the reliability, operability, and evolution of our internal engineering platform. This is a hands-on role at the intersection of platform engineering, reliability, and intelligent automation with a clear mandate: reduce toil, improve observability, and enable systems (AI agents) to safely operate at scale.
You'll work directly with engineering teams to harden services, respond to incidents, and build automation that makes the platform increasingly self-managing over time. A key aspect of this role is designing and operating AI-driven and agent-based workflows, including the guardrails, validation systems, and observability needed to allow automated systems to safely generate and act on changes in production environments.
Responsibilities:
Own the reliability, availability, and performance of the internal platform and critical services.
Participate in on-call rotations; lead incident triage, debugging, root cause analysis, and post-mortems.
Build and operate platform automation and AI-powered workflows (including agent-based systems) to reduce manual operational effort.
Design and implement guardrails, validation pipelines, and safety mechanisms for automated and AI-generated changes to code and infrastructure.
Enable closed-loop automation systems (detect, diagnose, remediate, validate) to improve system resilience.
Define and track SLIs and SLOs; use reliability data to guide engineering decisions.
Standardise build, deployment, and release workflows for safe, predictable delivery, including automation-friendly and AI-integrated pipelines.
Identify and remediate security vulnerabilities across systems and services, including risks introduced by automated changes.
Partner with development teams on service design, resilience, and operability, with an emphasis on automation-first and AI-compatible system design.
Requirements:
5+ years of experience operating production platforms or large-scale distributed systems.
Proven track record in incident management, on-call operations, and production debugging.
Strong programming skills in Java, Python, Go, Shell, or equivalent.
Hands-on experience with observability tooling (monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing).
Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines and release processes.
Familiarity with platform upgrades, dependency management, and system lifecycle operations.
Experience building or integrating AI-driven (agent-based) automation frameworks, or a strong interest in this space.
Working knowledge of Linux-based production environments.
Strong communication and cross-team collaboration skills.
Nice to Have:
Experience with SRE frameworks: SLOs, error budgets, reliability reviews.
Experience with chaos engineering or resilience testing.
Background in building self-healing systems.
History of driving platform standardisation across large engineering organisations.
What Success Looks Like at 6 Months:
Platform reliability metrics are tracked, visible, and trending in the right direction.
On-call burden is measurably reduced through automation and better runbooks.
At least one significant automation or autonomous remediation initiative shipped and adopted by engineering teams.
Platform upgrades and rollouts are executed safely with documented processes.
AI-driven or automated changes are safely deployed with clear guardrails, observability, and rollback mechanisms.
Key Traits:
Strong ownership mentality.
Calm under pressure.
Bias toward automation.
Systems thinker who doesn't just fix problems but builds systems that prevent, detect, and autonomously remediate issues over time.

Experience
6-10 yrs