Vetted on a call by a Wave consultant, not scraped. £95,000 to £110,000.
ArgoCD is the specialism, and it goes further than most claims of it. Multi-cluster deployments, AppProject-based RBAC, version upgrades, OCI Helm repositories and notification routing, all in production. Sole infrastructure owner at a video platform business, running Kubernetes with Karpenter and KEDA, Crossplane, Linkerd, CloudNativePG and a Prometheus, Thanos and Grafana observability stack. Writes runbooks and pairs with engineering teams to hand the knowledge over.
Looking forLeft a linear TV video product in a declining market because they felt stuck maintaining rather than building. Wants greenfield and new technology to investigate. Was taking 15 to 20 days off before starting anywhere.
How they came acrossSubstantial hands-on record and a clear preference for investigative work over reactive work. Honest that 5 years away from the market had left them unsure what to ask for, which is worth knowing on both sides.
Kubernetes, EKS, ArgoCD, Crossplane, Helm · Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, NixOS, Vault · AWS, Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Datadog
Site reliability and platform engineering across a short-form video platform, a media technology business and a sanctions screening company. 4 employers, average stint 1 year 10 months.
They were in live processes with several companies when we spoke in July 2026 and were unsure about their own salary benchmark after 5 years away from the market. Move quickly or not at all.
Degree in computational science.
Platform engineering with an AI infrastructure edge, which is a less common combination than the job title suggests. Built foundational platform infrastructure for a global research and development function at a public safety technology company, covering GPU-accelerated compute orchestration, model training and inference pipelines, and developer experience. Go, Rust, Python and Node across the code, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code underneath, and 15 years of applying machine learning before that was fashionable.
Looking forWants technical leadership without line management, mentoring, and scope beyond a single team. Also wants stability after a restructure, and was explicit that a narrow SRE title would undersell what they do.
How they came acrossBelieves an automated filter rejected them for a role they were right for and asked to be represented directly, which is a fair read rather than a chip on the shoulder. Direct about what they want and equally direct about what they don't.
Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, bare metal · Go, Rust, Python, Node.js, Scala · Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog, MLOps tooling
A founder and agency chapter either side of engineering leadership roles at a music-sharing platform, a drug discovery organisation, an online music retailer, a build platform and a payments company. 17 employers, average stint 1 year 7 months.
17 employers at an average of 19 months, much of it consultancy and founder work, is the obvious question. A 4-day London commute from Manchester is out, and they asked that a short-term contract they're currently on isn't surfaced to prospective employers.
Academic background in humanities subjects rather than computing. The technical career is self-taught and learned on the job.
Graduate SRE to staff SRE in 5 years at the same business, which is a fast climb and a well-evidenced one. Runs roughly 20 applications across ECS and EKS including the largest gateway workload, and led the observability platform migration from Datadog to Coralogix with OpenTelemetry underneath. Chaos engineering and blameless post-mortems are part of the practice, and the on-call rota follows the sun across the UK, US and India.
Looking forNot actively looking. Says they've hit a ceiling and understand everything happening around them, and want an environment that forces them to learn rather than one that hands them new tools.
How they came acrossSelf-aware about the ceiling in a way that reads as honest rather than restless. Reacted well to a concrete technical brief and asked about scope rather than about title.
AWS, ECS, EKS, Lambda, Terraform · Python, Bash, SQL, Docker, Kubernetes · Coralogix, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, PagerDuty
A first career as a quantity surveyor and commercial analyst on major construction programmes, then 5 years of SRE progression at a software monetisation company. 4 employers, average stint 1 year 5 months.
3 months notice and they weren't actively searching, so the technical scope on offer has to be visibly bigger than what they have.
Masters in data science.
Tell me which came closest and I recalibrate, then come back with 10 to 15 more inside 24 hours.
Show me the wider bank