Site Reliability Engineering Lead, Lending Cloud Services

Who are we?

At Finastra, we’re a global leader in financial services software, dedicated to expanding access to financial services and shaping what’s next for the industry. Our technology powers mission‑critical solutions across Lending, Payments and Universal Banking, supporting over 7,000 customers, including 80% of the world’s top 50 banks, in more than 110 countries.

What will you contribute?

The Site Reliability Engineering Lead will improve the reliability, resilience, performance and operational efficiency of services delivered through Lending Cloud Services. Working closely with LCS Operations, Engineering, Product, Implementation and regional delivery teams, the role will apply Site Reliability Engineering principles to production and non-production services. Its focus will be on reducing operational risk, strengthening observability, automating repeatable activities and improving the predictability of service delivery.

The role will act as a senior technical authority within LCS Operations, helping to bridge the transition from build to operate and ensuring that services are designed, deployed and supported with clear operational standards.

Responsibilities and deliverables

Your responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:

• •Report to the LCS Head of Operations and provide technical leadership for reliability, resilience, observability and operational automation across LCS services.
• •Define, implement and continuously improve Site Reliability Engineering practices within the LCS operating model.
• •Establish and maintain appropriate service-level indicators, service-level objectives and operational thresholds for critical services.
• •Develop and maintain monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting and performance-management capabilities across production and non-production environments.
• •Improve alert quality by reducing noise, eliminating duplicate alerts and ensuring that actionable events are routed to the correct operational teams.
• •Work with Engineering, Product and Implementation teams to embed reliability, supportability and operational readiness requirements throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• •Provide operational acceptance criteria and ensure that new services, releases, upgrades and customer implementations are ready to transition into support.
• •Act as a technical liaison between LCS Operations, implementation teams, Evergreen teams, Product Engineering and infrastructure or platform teams.
• •Identify recurring incidents, operational failure patterns and manual interventions, then lead their elimination through automation, engineering improvements or problem management.
• •Support major incident diagnosis and recovery, using application, database, infrastructure and integration telemetry to accelerate service restoration.
• •Contribute to root-cause analysis and ensure that corrective actions address underlying technical and operational weaknesses rather than only immediate symptoms.
• •Develop and maintain operational automation using appropriate scripting, infrastructure-as-code and configuration-as-code practices.
• •Work with development and platform teams to improve CI/CD controls, deployment reliability, release validation, rollback capability and environment consistency.
• •Build and maintain operational dashboards that provide clear visibility of service health, availability, capacity, performance and reliability risks.
• •Monitor and optimise application, database, integration and infrastructure performance across LCS.
• •Provide expert technical support across database server environments, including performance analysis and query optimisation.
• •Diagnose complex issues involving system logs, data flows, messaging, integrations, application behaviour, database performance and infrastructure dependencies.
• •Support capacity planning, demand forecasting and performance testing to ensure that services can meet current and anticipated customer requirements.
• •Participate in resilience testing, disaster recovery exercises and service continuity planning, ensuring that findings are tracked through to resolution.
• •Define and maintain technical runbooks, recovery procedures, support documentation and operational knowledge required by LCS support teams.
• •Promote effective knowledge transfer and reduce dependency on individual subject-matter experts.
• •Provide clear operational updates, identify risks and dependencies, and propose practical mitigation plans to the LCS Head of Operations and other stakeholders.
• •Use reliability and operational data to prioritise improvement initiatives and demonstrate measurable reductions in incidents, recovery time, operational effort and service risk.
• •Participate in an appropriate on-call or shift-based support model for business-critical services.
• •Coach other members of the LCS Operations organisation in SRE practices, automation, troubleshooting and data-led service management.

Required experience

• •At least eight years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, production engineering, cloud operations, application support or a comparable technical operations role.
• •Demonstrable experience supporting business-critical enterprise applications in complex, highly controlled environments.
• •Strong understanding of Site Reliability Engineering principles, including:
• - Service-level indicators and service-level objectives
• - Error budgets
• - Observability
• - Incident and problem management
• - Operational automation
• - Capacity and performance management
• - Resilience and disaster recovery
• - Reduction of operational toil
• •Experience working across multiple applications and environments, ideally involving finance and banking solutions e.g., lending, general ledger or payments platforms.
• •Strong production troubleshooting skills across applications, databases, middleware, integrations and cloud infrastructure.
• •Experience with monitoring, logging, alerting and observability platforms, with the ability to translate telemetry into actionable operational insight.
• •Strong scripting and automation skills using one or more of the following:
• - Python
• - Shell scripting
• - PowerShell
• - Ruby
• - Perl
• •Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated deployment, configuration management and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• •Strong experience with one of the following database technologies, with an interest in developing capabilities in this area:
• - Microsoft SQL Server
• - Oracle
• - PostgreSQL
• •Strong SQL performance-tuning, query-analysis and database diagnostic skills.
• •Experience with web services, APIs, XML-based messaging and enterprise integration technologies.
• •Experience with messaging and integration technologies such as JMS, MQ, web services and TCP/IP sockets.
• •Knowledge of Java-based enterprise applications and frameworks, including Spring, Hibernate or JPA.
• •Knowledge of web and application-server technologies such as Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic or WebSphere.
• •Practical experience supporting services in cloud environments, ideally Microsoft Azure.
• •Experience supporting large-scale programmes, global initiatives or services operating across multiple regions and time zones.
• •Understanding of IT service-management practices and their interaction with SRE, DevOps and product-engineering disciplines.
• •Experience working with agile delivery teams while maintaining the controls required for stable production operations.
• •Ability to communicate complex technical issues clearly to operational, engineering and senior leadership audiences.
• •Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• •Ability to work effectively in a dynamic, highly collaborative and globally distributed environment.
• •Willingness to work flexibly and participate in shift or on-call arrangements, including weekends, where required.

Measures of success

Success in the role will be demonstrated through:

• •Improved service availability, stability and operational predictability.
• •Reduced frequency and im