Site Reliability Engineer

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better.

We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day.

Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 7,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.

At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs, and productivity—but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education every day: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

We are looking for an enthusiastic and proactive Site Reliability Engineer to join our SRE team and help us ensure we provide world-class resilience and performance across the platform. The remit and focus of the role is to advise on all aspects of site reliability, including availability, scalability, observability, and capacity planning. It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge—if you’re an energetic and collaborative Site Reliability Engineer, this is the role for you.

Core Responsibilities

• Proactively monitor and analyze platform performance.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to address performance bottlenecks and ensure scalability.
• Assist engineering teams with implementing and reviewing SLOs.
• Continually improve observability through monitoring and alerting, and dashboards, using tools such as DataDog or Prometheus.
• Work with other teams to ensure it is effective and provides full coverage.
• Ensure the service is highly available and resilient.
• Champion best practices in design for high availability.
• Devise runbooks and run game sessions to test our DR plan, H/A, and backups.
• Conduct assessments of capacity and plan for scaling to meet current and future business needs.
• Work closely with the Head of Platform Engineering and Head of SRE to strategize and implement scalable solutions.
• Work closely with the Platform team, feature teams, and 2nd line support and other stakeholders to ensure a good level of service is provided for our customers and embed SRE practices.
• Key player in the response and troubleshooting of incidents, ensuring rapid resolution and minimizing downtime.
• Participate in blameless postmortems to identify root cause and corrective actions.
• Develop and maintain playbooks and documentation.

Requirements

• Experience in performance monitoring and analysis.
• Capacity planning experience.
• Scripting and automation skills, with experience in relevant technologies.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, in particular, Terraform.
• Understanding of relational database technologies and their cloud versions (e.g., AWS Aurora).
• Experience with messaging and distributed asynchronous workloads.
• Experience with nginx or similar technologies.
• Familiarity with SRE processes.
• Aware of DevOps principles like the 3 ways and 5 ideals.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with other database technologies and cloud platforms.
• Past experience with Enterprise solutions running at scale.
• Familiarity with Kanban and Agile development processes.
• Experience with containerization, for example, Docker.
• Familiarity with software best practices such as Refactoring, Clean Code, Domain-Driven Design, and Test-Driven Development.

Benefits

The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you’ll see the impact of your work every day. We also offer:

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training, and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company-wide days given over Easter, Summer, and Christmas.
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary.
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, mental health support, counselling, and personalized Health Checks.
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa.
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows.
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay).
• 5 free return-to-work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching).
• All of our roles champion flexible working, and we are happy to discuss what this means to you.
• Social committees that plan team, office, and company-wide events to bring people together and celebrate success.