Lead Site Reliability Engineer

City of London

Permanent, On-site Full-time

Who we are

We are an energy trading company generating liquidity across global commodities markets. We combine deep trading expertise with proprietary technology and the power of data science to be the best-in-class. Our understanding of volatile, data-intensive markets is a key part of our edge.

At Dare, you will be joining a team of ambitious individuals who challenge themselves and each other. We have a culture of empowering exceptional people to become the best version of themselves.

The Role

As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you will play a critical role in ensuring the stability, scalability, and performance of mission-critical, low-latency trading platforms. You’ll work closely with traders, quantitative analysts, and engineers in a fast-paced environment where precision and speed are essential. This role combines deep technical expertise with leadership responsibility. You will own the reliability strategy while remaining hands-on with in production systems and complex distributed architectures.

You will define and drive reliability practices for latency-sensitive trading infrastructure, establish and enforce service level objectives, and lead incident response across live trading environments. You’ll focus on optimising system performance and latency, while collaborating with stakeholders to balance reliability, execution speed, and operational risk. Shaping technical direction, you will actively contribute to debugging, automation, and system design, while mentoring engineers to build a high-performing and resilient engineering culture.

What you’ll be doing

1. Ensure real-time trading systems remain stable and performant, proactively monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving issues impacting trading or market connectivity.
2. Lead production incident response as the first line of defence, driving live troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and long-term remediation.
3. Define and own reliability strategy performance including service level objectives, service level indicators, and error budgets for critical trading systems.
4. Collaborate with trading, engineering, and infrastructure teams on capacity planning, upgrades, and low/zero-downtime migrations.
5. Drive automation across operational workflows using Python, Bash, and SQL to reduce manual intervention.
6. Continuously optimise systems and networks, leveraging deep operating system, networking, and performance expertise.
7. Manage and mentor engineers across London and offshore teams, promoting engineering best practices.
8. Act as a senior escalation point during high-severity incidents.
9. Participate in and lead on-call rotations, including nights for ICE market opening hours.
10. Support releases, maintenance, and trading events outside standard hours including weekends.

What You’ll Bring

1. Extensive experience as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), DevOps or Production Support Engineering.
2. Experience within trading, hedge funds, or financial services, ideally close to front-office systems.
3. Strong understanding of low-latency, highly distributed trading systems.
4. Deep knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
5. Deep expertise in Linux/UNIX environments and command-line tooling.
6. Advanced understanding of application-level networking (TCP/IP, UDP).
7. Strong programming/scripting skills (Python, Bash) with SQL proficiency.
8. Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Kubernetes).
9. Proven experience in incident management, root-cause analysis, and system optimisation.
10. Experience managing large-scale infrastructure, including capacity planning and migrations.
11. Ability to leverage AI to develop and deliver solutions and rapid velocity.

Desirable

1. Experience in market-making environment.
2. Strong operating system level performance tuning expertise.
3. Exposure to exchange connectivity and market data systems.
4. Understanding of financial markets and trading workflows.

Benefits & perks

1. Competitive salary
2. Vitality health insurance and dental cover
3. 38 days of holiday (including bank holidays)
4. Pension scheme
5. Annual Bluecrest health checks
6. A personal learning & development budget of £5000
7. Free gym membership
8. Specsavers vouchers
9. Enhanced family leave
10. Cycle to Work scheme
11. Credited Deliveroo dinner account
12. Office massage therapy
13. Freshly served office breakfast twice a week
14. Fully stocked fridge and pantry
15. Social events and a games room

Diversity matters

We believe in a workplace where our people can fulfil their potential, whatever their background or whomever they are. We celebrate the breadth of experience and see this as critical to problem-solving and to Dare thriving as a business. Our culture rewards curiosity and drive, so the best ideas triumph and everyone here can make an impact.

Please let us know ahead of the interview and testing processes if you require any reasonable adjustments or assistance during the application process.

We’re also proud to be certified a ‘Great Place to Work’.