Site Reliability & Observability Engineer

Dunelm • London/Leicester • 1d ago

Overview

Home. There’s no place like it.

And there’s no feeling like helping people create the joy of feeling truly at home. At Dunelm, that’s what we do. We’re the UK's number one choice for homewares because we make home life lovelier for our customers. And we’ve crafted a workplace that feels just as welcoming - where you can bring your ideas, be yourself, and feel right at home.

Remaining first-choice for savvy homeware shoppers also involves making use of advanced technology. We have embraced serverless, event-driven architecture and container orchestration, and are moving from a monolithic front end to micro front ends. You’ll join a talented and collaborative group of engineers and architects who care about quality and reliability. Learn more on our Engineering Blog (https://engineering.dunelm.com).

Site Reliability Engineering

Our SRE team is a high-trust, high-impact group of engineers who bring software engineering principles to operational reliability. We are hands-on developers and systems thinkers who build scalable, observable, and resilient platforms.

We work closely with other Engineering, Data, Platform and Operations teams to help them build reliable, observable, and cost-effective systems. We lead incident response, improve deployment safety, and guide teams toward sustainable service ownership.

We process large volumes of telemetry data every day and are constantly evolving our approach to cost-efficient observability, adaptive sampling, and meaningful tracing. Observability is not a bolt-on - it is a first-class concern that shapes how we build and support systems across the business.

Ways of Working

This is a hybrid role, with time split between working from home and our London or Leicester offices. We get together as a team for two days every month, but there may be an expectation of other ad-hoc office days where necessary.

Interview Process

Step 1: Introductory video call (around 45 minutes) with the Principal Engineer and Delivery Lead to get to know each other, explain the role, and hear about your experience, goals and approach to work.
Step 2: A 90-minute technical discussion with a few members of the SRE team. You will work through scenario-based questions designed to help you to highlight your knowledge, specific approach and where you feel any improvements could be made.

We Are Committed to Inclusion

If you are not a 100% fit (but very close) to having the essential skills and experience, we would encourage you to still apply for this position.

We want everyone to be as comfortable as possible, so if you need any adjustments within the interview process, please let us know as soon as possible.

What you'll be doing

We’re looking for a Site Reliability Engineer, with a strong focus on observability engineering, to help scale OpenTelemetry and drive service health across our technology stack. Your work will directly impact reliability, performance, and customer experience.

Key responsibilities:

1. Engineering & Automation: Build automation and reliability tooling using well-architected, maintainable, testable and - most importantly - easy to read and understand code. Contribute to shared libraries, observability components and internal platforms.

2. Observability & OpenTelemetry: Help evolve our observability strategy across systems and services. Drive how we collect, process, sample, and surface trace and metrics data using OpenTelemetry. Focus on high-signal telemetry that enables fast diagnosis, cost efficiency, and meaningful visibility across the stack.

3. SLOs/SLIs & Service Ownership: Help teams truly own their services by helping to define and adopt meaningful SLIs and SLOs. Guide product teams in using observability data to make reliability measurable.

4. Incident Response: Participate in on-call investigations when issues arise. Drive blameless post-incident reviews and help to identify observability gaps, recommend mitigating actions that stem losses, but also permanent fixes that prevent recurrence.

5. IaC & CI/CD: Model infrastructure using tools such as Pulumi, CDK, and Terraform in AWS and other PaaS and SaaS providers. Improve pipelines and support safe deployment strategies (e.g. canary, blue green).

6. Mentoring & Team Growth: Help support and coach other engineers. Participate in technical discussions and share knowledge through pairing, planning, and documentation.

7. Continuous Learning and Innovation: Stay ahead of emerging practices in observability, resilience, and platform engineering. Lead team proof-of-concepts and introduce new patterns or tools that improve our platform.

8. Strategic Development: Contribute to the prioritisation of the SRE roadmap. Help shape observability tooling, telemetry patterns, and platform-wide approaches to service ownership and reliability.

9. Aligning to Business Goals: Use observability insights to support product goals. Help to ensure SRE priorities align with Dunelm’s wider objectives for quality, performance, and customer experience.

What we'll look for in you

Essential Skills

TypeScript or similar strongly typed programming language(s).
Ability to write idiomatic, pragmatic, and testable code, with strong, appropriate, automated testing.
AWS, including serverless services and general networking principles
Understanding of SRE principles, namely: embracing risk, service level objectives, eliminating toil, monitoring distributed systems, automation and release engineering
AWS expertise, including serverless services and general networking principles
Linux system administration knowledge - able to use a command line to navigate and troubleshoot a server or container running a Linux OS
Configuring and using observability back-end SaaS platforms, such as Datadog, Grafana etc.
Infrastructure-as-Code tools, such as Pulumi and Terraform
Kubernetes fundamentals (deploying and monitoring workloads)
CI/CD pipelines (GitLab or similar) and build/test/deploy automation
Participation in incident response, root cause analysis and post-incident reviews
Strong problem-solving and investigative mindset, with high attention to detail

Desirable Skills

Rust or a similar compiled language (e.g. Go)
Knowledge of OpenTelemetry tools, specification, APIs etc.
Instrumenting and running OpenTelemetry in production at scale.
Distributed tracing and trace sampling
Cost optimisation for observability and cloud services
Exposure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Deep Kubernetes observability (e.g. metrics exporters, service mesh)
Familiarity with challenges in the retail sector is a bonus but not expected

Behaviours and Values

At Dunelm, our shared values of Act Like Owners, Keep Listening & Learning, Long-Term Thinking, and Stronger Together serve as the foundation for our success. These values guide us continuously; improving our practices and ensure we dedicate our time to what truly matters. As a Site Reliability Engineer, you will exemplify these key behaviours: