SRE Lead - Hawthorn East

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Coles Group is hiring a Site Reliability Lead to join its Melbourne Hawthorn East Technology team, a permanent full‑time on‑site role (hybrid) focused on elevating reliability, performance and operational excellence across our products and platforms. You’ll partner with Operations to surface pain points, define an SRE strategy, champion modern monitoring and observability, and drive cloud and infrastructure excellence in Azure, CI/CD and cost‑aware investments. You’ll need deep infrastructure expertise, experience with SRE principles, strong stakeholder engagement and financial accountability in a large enterprise. To strengthen your application, demonstrate measurable improvements in outages, performance gains and budget tradeoffs, and highlight collaboration with senior stakeholders. Coles values flexibility, inclusivity and development opportunities.

We’ve been proudly serving Australian communities since 1914 and have grown to become a top 30-listed company on the ASX with a portfolio of iconic homegrown brands. At the heart of our continued success is over 115,000 team members working across the country, all contributing to bringing our customers smiles. You’ll not only get to see your work make a difference, you’ll be part of a team working together to help Australians eat and live better every day.

About the team

Our Technology team is the backbone of the business, building and maintaining the information technology infrastructure that support Coles Group. As a part of the Technology team, you get the opportunity to work through complex, challenging, meaningful problems using large data sets and new technologies to expand your skills and experience.

Permanent
Location Melbourne (Hybrid)

At Coles Group, technology is at the heart of how we serve millions of Australians every week. As we continue to modernise our platforms and scale our digital capabilities, we’re creating a brand-new opportunity for a Site Reliability Lead to join our Technology function.

This is a pivotal role, one we’ve never recruited for in this team before. This role is designed to elevate reliability, performance and operational excellence across our products, systems and platforms.

About the Role

As Site Reliability Lead, you will operate at the intersection of technology leadership and operational excellence. You’ll work closely with our Operations teams to deeply understand their day-to-day challenges, system frustrations, and emerging risks, including identifying gaps they may not yet see.

You will own the reliability space for the team: shaping strategy, introducing modern SRE practices, and bringing best-in-market solutions to Coles. This role combines technical depth, stakeholder engagement, and commercial accountability.

What You’ll Be Doing

Operational Partnership & Insight

• Partner closely with Operations teams to uncover pain points, inefficiencies, and systemic risks
• Proactively identify reliability gaps, performance bottlenecks, and resilience opportunities
• Translate operational feedback into strategic technical improvements

Technical Leadership

• Define and lead the Site Reliability strategy for the team
• Introduce and uplift SRE principles, standards and best practices
• Evaluate market-leading tools and solutions, recommending and implementing those that align with Coles’ ecosystem
• Provide technical direction across products, systems and platforms

Cloud & Infrastructure Excellence

• Lead reliability initiatives across Azure and cloud infrastructure environments
• Drive improvements in system resilience, scalability, and availability
• Oversee and optimise CI/CD pipelines, guiding best-practice implementation
• Champion modern monitoring, alerting and observability frameworks

Financial & Commercial Accountability

• Manage budgets within the reliability domain
• Assess cost vs. value of tooling, infrastructure improvements and platform investments
• Ensure cloud and infrastructure optimisation aligns with financial objectives

About You

You are a technically strong leader who thrives in complex enterprise environments and enjoys building new capability from the ground up. You combine deep infrastructure expertise with commercial awareness and strong stakeholder engagement skills.

We’re looking for experience in:

• Azure infrastructure and broader cloud environments
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and frameworks
• Monitoring, alerting, and observability tooling
• CI/CD pipeline design, implementation and optimisation
• Infrastructure resilience, availability and performance tuning
• Working closely with operational or support teams in large environments
• Budget management and financial oversight within a technical function

You’ll stand out if you:

• Have a strong understanding of what the external market offers in SRE, DevOps and cloud tooling
• Can assess emerging technologies and translate them into practical enterprise solutions
• Are comfortable influencing senior stakeholders
• Enjoy creating structure and strategy where it doesn’t yet exist

What’s in it for you?

• Flexible working options: We know that work is only one part of your life, so we actively encourage a positive work-life balance and provide hybrid working options to help you achieve it.
• Office perks: Take advantage of our gym facility and fitness classes, free parking, BBQ area, mini-Coles supermarket, fooderie hub where you can sample new products before they hit the shelves, school holiday program and so much more when you come in.
• Discounts: Eligible team members receive 5% discount all year round on your Supermarket and Liquor online and in-store purchases. We also offer additional periods of double discount (10%) at various times throughout the year. As well as hotdeals exclusive to team members that translate into additional savings.
• Reward through recognition: Give and receive recognition, linked to our Coles values, through our digital recognition platform ‘mythanks’. You can accumulate points to redeem in the online shop for exciting gifts and electronic gift cards from an extensive range of retailers.
• Opportunities for learning and development: No matter where you start within our diverse business, you’ll have experiences, exposure, and education to satisfy you. Discover and explore a variety of career development programs and job-specific training.
• Paid parental leave: We understand how important your life outside work is and offer permanent team members paid parental leave to support you in balancing work and family.
• Investment in your future: Our annual team member share plan offer allows eligible team members to make regular pre-tax salary sacrifice deductions to purchase Coles Group shares.

About the recruitment process

We’re continuing to build a gender equitable team, and a culture that is just as diverse, inclusive and welcoming as the communities we serve. We are committed to creating a workplace that is safe and respectful for our team. We encourage applications from people of all ages, cultures (including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples), abilities, sexual orientation and gender identities.

We’re happy to adjust our recruitment process to support candidates with disability. For further information and additional contact details visit the ‘Our Recruitment Process’ section of our careers site or email [email protected]

Job ID: 174722

Employment Type: Full time

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