The Company:

Wagestream is on a mission to bring better financial wellbeing to frontline workers.

We partner with some of the world’s most famous employers, like Bupa, Green King, Asda and the NHS, to give their teams access to fairer financial services - all built around flexible pay. Over three million people can now choose how often they’re paid, track their shifts and earnings, start saving, use budgeting tools, get free financial coaching, and access fairer financial products. All in one financial wellbeing super-app.

Wagestream is unique: VC-backed and growing at scale-up pace, but with a social conscience. Some of the world's leading financial charities and impact funds were our founding investors, and we operate on a social charter - which means every product we build has to improve financial health and reduce the $5.6bn ‘premium’ lower-income earners pay for financial services each year.

You’d be joining a team of over 170 passionate, ambitious people, across Europe and the USA, building a category-leading fintech product and all united by that same mission.

The Opportunity:

We're hiring a Head of Site Reliability Engineering to own our technology platforms across the UK, US, and Europe, which serve a million users and process millions of payments each month.

You will be responsible for: system availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning.

We are looking for a leader and a doer. The role will involve a significant amount of hands-on work in the initial months, and if you’re looking for a management-only opportunity then this role is not for you. The ideal candidate will have a deep experience at an IC-level, and will be happy to get their hands dirty when appropriate.

The Team:

The team consists of a 5 person technical support group and a Principal Infrastructure & Security Engineer. We are looking to expand this team with a small number of additional hires to further improve our skills around site reliability engineering and database administration.

What will you be doing?

You will be the primary individual accountable for the health of our platform in each of our markets. This will involve:

1. Team Management: Hiring, developing and promoting the right people and skill-sets to ensure we provide a high quality of service.

2. Infrastructure Management: Ensuring that all hardware and software infrastructure necessary for the platform's operations is in place, properly configured, and maintained.

3. System Monitoring and Reliability: Monitoring systems to ensure they are running efficiently and reliably. This will involve tracking performance metrics, identifying and resolving system issues, and implementing measures to prevent downtime.

4. Security Management: Overseeing the security of the platform’s technical systems. This includes protecting against cyber threats, managing access controls, and ensuring compliance with relevant security standards and regulations.

5. Support and Troubleshooting: Providing technical support to internal teams or external clients. This can involve troubleshooting issues, assisting with technical queries, and ensuring that users can effectively use the platform.

6. Automation and Optimisation: Implementing automation to streamline operations and improve efficiency. This can involve scripting, deploying software tools, and optimising processes to reduce manual effort and errors.

7. Collaboration with other Departments: Working closely with other departments, such as Engineering, Product and Client Success, to ensure alignment of technical operations with broader business goals.

8. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning: Preparing for, and responding to, emergencies that could impact technical infrastructure; such as data breaches, hardware failures, or natural disasters.

What experience might you have?

Must-haves: (But if you’re close… we'd still love to talk to you!)

• Prior experience in an SRE environment (i.e. applying Software Engineering principles to operational problems)
• Deep understanding of AWS services
• Prior management experience
• Comfortable with major incident management, and the ability to develop incident commander experience in others
• Ability to present to clients in stressful situations
• Ability to operate in unambiguous and uncertain environments, and to resolve ambiguity independently
• Familiarity with ISO27001 and/or SOC2 audit processes and ability to support these processes
• Working understanding of at least 1 programming language
• Prior experience operating SQL/relational databases

Can-be-learned:

• Familiarity with PostgreSQL

Within 1 month you’ll:

• Have built an understanding of our business domain and related technical concepts
• Understand the key components of our technology stack and their deployment architecture
• Have conducted a gap analysis to identify any skill gaps in the existing team structure

Within 3 months you’ll:

• Have made at least 1 initial hire in the SRE/DBA domain
• Developed a clear definition of all SLOs across all of our markets
• Revamped our monitoring dashboards

Within 6 months you’ll:

• Ensured our platform is well monitored and has sufficient scaling capacity for the next couple of years

Working Policy: Hybrid

Salary: Starting from £100,000 + bonus/stock + benefits

Benefits:

• 25 Days Annual Leave in addition to public holidays (up to 5 day rollover), as well as flexible time off allowances for any ad-hoc childcare/family/caring needs
• 10 days Annual Leave Buy-Back scheme - for if you’d like some additional time off
• 12 weeks paid Maternity Leave and 4 weeks paid Paternity Leave for employees with over 12 months service
• Special Leave for In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments
• Paid leave to volunteer
• 10 days Work from Abroad policy
• £250 home office allowance to make WFH comfortable
• Brand new equipment - from the latest Apple MacBooks to 34” curved monitors at Wagestream HQ
• Salary sacrifice to pension, as well as bonus exchange to Pension: reap even more rewards of any bonus by paying into your pension & save on Tax and NI + added compound growth
• The best benefit of all, access to Wagestream!
• Access to Salary Sacrifice Schemes via ThanksBen: THE Benefits marketplace. Choose the benefits you want, when you want. Pay less tax, receive more value

Additional:

• Additional Pension Payments
• Workplace nurseries
• Cycle to Work
• Tech Scheme
• Healthcare cash plans, etc

At Wagestream we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Wagestream is an equal opportunity workplace. We are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity/expression, or veteran status.