Head of Cloud SRE/Operations

Job Description

At M&G our vision is: to become the best loved and most successful savings and investment business and were looking for people who are excited about joining us on our journey. Were digitally transforming and investing heavily in technology and innovation to develop new and improved customer propositions that really raise the bar for our customers. To help us achieve our vision were looking for exceptional people who live our values and behaviours and who can inspire others; embrace change; deliver results and keep it simple. We know that an inclusive environment makes us more accessible and ensures we attract, engage, promote and retain exceptional people. We welcome applications from all individuals regardless of age, gender/gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity/nationality, disability, or military service and welcome those who have taken career breaks. We will consider flexible working arrangements or home working arrangements for any of our roles. What you can expect from us:We are committed to creating an environment where you can be exceptional at all you do. To help us deliver this, we promise to:

Challenge Your Limits by creating a stimulating working environment and providing opportunities for you to be involved in meaningful and challenging work

Support Your Aspirations with a commitment to learning and development that helps you achieve and build your experience with people who want you to succeed

Value Your Input whereby leaders and managers will involve you in key decisions, listen to your thoughts and recognise the important contribution you make

Balance Your Life through a work life partnership that focuses on making this an inclusive, diverse and friendly place to work and offers the flexibility and support that enables everyone to be at their best

How do we support our employees: All M&G plc employees will be supported in the workplace through our M&G Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). If you need counselling, confidential financial or legal advice. The service is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and offers access to qualified professionals who can provide specialist information, advice and support on many issues. It offers a broad range of services, including help with family issues, maintaining work/life balance and mental health support. About the role: SRE arose partially as a response to the division between product development and operations teams. Here at M&G we are using this methodology to run our cloud platforms and products that underpin our business applications. As the Head of Cloud SRE, you will build, lead, inspire and develop your team to deliver the best results for M&G, and you will strategically plan for the future while keeping on top of BAU priorities. The teams key focus is to build the best cloud environment to support our cloud migration programme and enable our ongoing digital transformation. "There are a lot of attributes SRE would share with any engineering discipline: pragmatic, objective, articulate, expressive. However, one that sets itself apart is a desire to straddle layers of abstraction." So what would you be doing... In addition to an understanding of systems, site reliability engineers are also responsible for specific tasks and outcomes. You will be leading this team to develop their skills in line with the SRE methodology and building the team further to ensure we can operate our cloud platforms at scale. The core principles the role holder to operate to are outlined below, however given we are in a period of transitioning to a new way of working, it is critical you can take the team on the journey to the following: 1. Operations is a software problem - "The basic tenet of SRE is that doing operations well is a software problem. SRE should therefore use software engineering approaches to solve that problem." 2. Manage by Service Level Objectives (SLOs) - Maintaining 100% availability isnt the goal of SRE. "Instead, the product team and the SRE team select an appropriate availability target for the service and its user base, and the service is managed to that SLO. Deciding on such a target requires strong collaboration from the business." 3. Work to minimize toil - Toil is tedious, manual, work. SRE doesnt accept toil as the default. "We believe that if a machine can perform a desired operation, then a machine often should. This is a distinction (and a value) not often seen in other organizations, where toil is the job, and thats what youre paying a person to do." 4. Automate this years job away - Automation goes hand-in-hand with reducing toil by "determining what to automate, under what conditions, and how to automate it." 5. Move fast by reducing the cost of failure - The later a problem is discovered, the harder it is to fix. SRE addresses this issue. "SREs are specifically charged with improving undesirably late problem discovery, yielding benefits for the company as a whole." 6. Share ownership with developers - SRE aims to reduce boundaries. "Ideally, both product development and SRE teams should have a holistic view of the stack-the frontend, backend, libraries, storage, kernels, and physical machine-and no team should jealously own single components." 7. Use the same tooling, regardless of function or job title - In SRE, you cant have different teams using different sets of tools. "There is no good way to manage a service that has one tool for the SREs and another for the product developers, behaving differently (and potentially catastrophically so) in different situations. The more divergence you have, the less your company benefits from each effort to improve each individual tool." You need to be this kind of person...

Passionate about providing unparalleled levels of service and automation to the cloud products that enable our business

Able to work and learn quickly in a fast paced, fun and dynamic environment

Care about doing a great job and exceeding expectations with the quality of what you do

Curious to learn and develop your own leadership and engineering skills

We always support colleagues to develop their skills. But to be successful in this role the following will be required:

Understand the risks associated with your job and what that means for you, M&G and all our stakeholders

You will have in-depth experience as a hands-on IT Engineer, with strong knowledge on different cloud technologies and platforms In the past you will have built and lead a team of techies on cloud technologies, governance and framew