SRE - DevOps Lead

Not Your Typical SRE/DevOps Role 

This isn’t just another infrastructure management job. No babysitting legacy systems. No corporate red tape hindering automation. No coasting. This is about building and leading the Site Reliability and DevOps function for a critical, global FinTech payments platform from an early stage. Fast.

We’re Navro, a rapidly scaling B2B payments startup, and we’re looking for an organised, detailed, relentlessly driven SRE - DevOps Lead. This is your chance to establish SRE principles, define our observability and reliability standards, implement cutting-edge automation, mentor a growing team, and make decisions that ensure the resilience and scalability of our entire platform. You won’t have layers of approval slowing you down. You will have the freedom and expectation to architect, implement, and own the reliability of our systems from day one. This isn’t a passenger role. We’re bringing you in for your deep technical expertise, your leadership, and your relentless drive for operational excellence.

Who we are

We are transforming payments for global platforms and e-commerce businesses. As the world’s first payments curation platform, we simplify cross-border transactions by uniting best-in-class infrastructure into a seamless ecosystem, enabling businesses to scale and operate effortlessly across borders. Cross-border workforce payments are slow, expensive, and outdated. We can’t be. Businesses rely on us to pay their people accurately and on time - contractors, freelancers, and employees across the globe.When we say we’ll deliver, failure isn’t an option. If we don’t do what we said we would, people don’t get paid - not just a transaction delayed, but real workers left without wages.That means a developer in Argentina missing their paycheck, a freelancer in the Philippines unable to pay rent, or a contractor in Poland unable to get to work. No excuses. No passengers. No tolerance for politics or mediocrity.

The Role

We are looking for a relentlessly driven and intellectually curious individual to lead our SRE-DevOps initiatives. Your primary focus will be to ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of Navro’s platform while driving automation and innovation.

You will have the opportunity to lead and develop a team, fostering their growth and collaboration, while working closely with cross-functional engineering teams to optimise infrastructure and enhance system resilience.

What This Role Demands:

⚡ You Own It – You’re accountable for platform reliability, scalability, performance, SLIs/SLOs, incident response, and the overall health of our production environment. If availability drops or latency spikes, it’s on you and your team to fix it and prevent recurrence.

⚡ You Ask the Hard Questions – You don’t just maintain systems; you challenge designs, probe for weaknesses, and demand operational readiness. Why this architecture? What are the failure modes? How can we automate this?

⚡ You Fix What’s Broken (and Automate It) – No waiting for permission. If a process involves manual toil, monitoring is insufficient, or deployments are flaky, you dive in, solve it, and automate it out of existence. You build resilient systems and processes.

⚡ You’re Hands-On – One minute you’re setting strategy and mentoring your team, the next you’re deep in Terraform code, designing CI/CD pipelines, analyzing observability data, or leading a critical incident response.

⚡ You Thrive in Chaos – Startups are messy. Incidents happen, priorities shift, ambiguity is constant. You bring calm, clarity, and structure to incident management and thrive on resolving complex operational challenges.

⚡ You Handle the Pressure – High stakes platform reliability. Demanding scaling requirements. You manage the pressure of keeping critical systems running smoothly 24/7 and make sound decisions during incidents.

⚡ You’re Here for the Journey – This is career-defining. It’s about building a high-performing SRE/DevOps function and culture. If you’re ready to lead and build resilient systems with Navro, let’s create something amazing together.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Leading, managing, and mentoring the SRE-DevOps function, fostering team growth and collaboration.
• Designing, implementing, and maintaining robust and automated CI/CD pipelines using tools like ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, and Terraform.
• Defining, measuring, and enforcing Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets in partnership with engineering teams.
• Championing and implementing best practices for system reliability, availability, and performance through comprehensive observability (e.g., DataDog, Kibana) and chaos engineering.
• Optimizing the deployment, scaling, and management of cloud-native, API-first applications using Kubernetes (K8s) and AWS.
• Collaborating with engineering teams to implement and adhere to the 12 Factor App methodology and drive modern software development best practices.
• Fostering a culture of continuous improvement, blameless post-mortems, and psychological safety within your team and across engineering.
• Leading effective troubleshooting, root cause analysis (RCA), and post-mortem processes for production incidents.
• Ensuring infrastructure design and implementation align with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and support potential multi-cloud strategies.

What We’re Looking For:

⚡ AWS & K8s Expert: Current AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional or AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional certification. Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or equivalent certification (or commitment to obtain it quickly – Navro covers costs).

⚡ CI/CD & IaC Pro: Proven, hands-on expertise designing and deploying CI/CD pipelines and managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like ArgoCD, Terraform, and GitHub Actions.

⚡ SRE Principles Advocate: Deep understanding and practical experience defining and managing SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets. Experience with chaos engineering disciplines.

⚡ Observability Practitioner: Familiarity and hands-on experience with modern observability tools (e.g., DataDog, Kibana, Prometheus, Grafana) and monitoring best practices.

⚡ Cloud-Native & 12-Factor: Solid grasp of 12 Factor App methodology and best practices for developing and operating cloud-native applications.

⚡ Problem Solver & Strategist: Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to lead technical discussions, guide root cause analysis, and make strategic infrastructure decisions.

⚡ Proven Leader: Demonstrated ability to manage, mentor, and develop SRE/DevOps engineers, fostering a collaborative and high-performing team culture.

⚡ Relevant Industry Experience: Experience in Payments, FinTech, or similarly regulated/high-availability industries is highly advantageous.

As part of this role you will receive the following:

• You will enjoy 26 days of annual leave (excluding Bank holidays)
• Volunteering & Compassionate leaves
• Maternity and Paternity leaves
• Private Healthcare 
• Company Options Scheme
• Team socials 
• Comprehensive, interactive & engaging Training - Leadership, Communication and Presentation Skills, Behavioural Profiling, Conflict Management, etc
• Career frameworks
• Flexibility surrounding other commitments; within your team we will work around child-care or other appointments you have. We just ask for advance notice!
• For those London Based 2-3 days per week in office 
• Working in a diverse and inclusive environment where we ensure that our people thrive

Navro does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Navro will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s).  Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.