About the role
Role Purpose:
WPP is undergoing an exciting global transformation, and we're looking for a passionate and driven Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our dynamic and innovative team This leadership opportunity is a great fit for someone who blends hands-on coding expertise with a strategic understanding of modern application architecture, cloud-native technologies, and agile team collaboration within the media and marketing landscape. We encourage applications from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design and maintain safe deployment patterns (blue-green, canary, progressive delivery) using ArgoCD for GitOps sync and Kargo for environment promotion across dev, staging and production.
- Instrument logs, metrics, traces and alerts to improve signal and reduce noise; define SLIs and SLOs with service owners and drive alerting from them.
- Tune and troubleshoot GKE workloads: autoscaling (HPA/VPA, cluster autoscaler), node pool strategy, network policies, resource requests/limits and workload isolation.
- Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules for core infrastructure (VPCs, GKE, CloudSQL, Pub/Sub, IAM, secrets, Cloudflare), with consistent naming, tagging and policy enforcement across environments and cloud providers.
- Lead or support incident response, diagnose production issues from telemetry, run blameless postmortems and drive long-term fixes to completion.
- Detect and eliminate configuration drift; standardize secrets handling, short-lived credentials and environment parity.
- Automate operational toil with Python and shell scripting and harden CI/CD pipelines with clear rollout-readiness standards.
Skill Requirements:
We understand that candidates may not have every single skill listed below. We encourage you to apply if you possess a strong foundation in product ownership and a willingness to learn and grow.
- Have 4–6+ years of experience in backend or infra-focused engineering roles (e.g., SRE, platform, DevOps, or fullstack), with at least 2 years owning production systems at scale.
- Can confidently write or review production-grade code and infra-as-code (Terraform, Helm, GitHub Actions, etc.).
- Deep hands-on Kubernetes experience in production, ideally GKE, including autoscaling, ingress/gateway strategies and network policies.
- Solid GCP fundamentals (IAM, VPC design, Workload Identity, Secret Manager, CloudSQL performance characteristics) and working experience with at least one major cloud (AWS or Azure or GCP).
- Think in systems: you understand cascading failure, timeout boundaries, dependency health, and blast radius.
- Regularly contribute to incident mitigation or long-term fixes (not just closing alerts).
- Can influence through well-written PRs, documentation, and thoughtful design reviews.
- Hands-on experience with Cloudflare or a comparable edge/CDN/WAF platform.
Nice to have:
- Experience with Kargo or similar progressive promotion tooling (Argo Rollouts, Flagger).Experience developing or integrating Kubernetes operators.
- Familiarity with service-level indicators (SLIs), service-level objectives (SLOs), and structured alerting.
- Building or integrating Kubernetes operators and CRDs.
Tools & Expectations:
- Datadog - Monitor infrastructure health, capture service-level metrics, reduce alert fatigue through high signal thresholds.
- PagerDuty - Own incident management pipeline. Route alerts by severity and align with business SLAs.
- GKE / Kubernetes - Improve cluster stability and workload isolation. Define auto-scaling configurations and tune for efficiency.
- ArgoCD - Keep releases consistent across clusters, monitor sync health, and define safe promotion gates between environments.
- Helm / GitOps - Validate release consistency across clusters. Monitor sync status and rollout safety.
- Terraform Cloud - Support DR planning and detect infrastructure changes through state comparisons.
- CloudSQL - Diagnose DB and networking issues. Monitor latency, enforce access patterns, and validate WAF usage.
- Cloudflare - Manage DNS, WAF, rate limiting and caching; diagnose edge latency and validate security rules.
- Secret Management - Audit access to secrets, apply short-lived credentials, and define alerts for abnormal usage.
- Python / Bash - Automate toil, build internal tooling, and script diagnostics.