System Reliability Engineer

Aggregate function:  Vodafone Business
Business Area:  VB Internet of Things Vertical
Posting Country:  Portugal
Date Posted:  28 Aug 2025
Full Time / Part Time:  Full Time
Contract Type:  Permanent

At Vodafone, we’re working hard to build a better future. A more connected, inclusive and sustainable world. As a dynamic global community, it's our human spirit, together with technology, that empowers us to achieve this. 

We challenge and innovate in order to connect people, businesses, and communities across the world. Delighting our customers and earning their loyalty drive us, and we experiment, learn fast and get it done, together.

With us, you can be truly be yourself and belong, share inspiration, embrace new opportunities, thrive, and make a real difference.

Join Us

At Vodafone, we’re not just shaping the future of connectivity for our customers – we’re shaping the future for everyone who joins our team. When you work with us, you’re part of a global mission to connect people, solve complex challenges, and create a sustainable and more inclusive world. If you want to grow your career whilst finding the perfect balance between work and life, Vodafone offers the opportunities to help you belong and make a real impact.

What you’ll do

By connecting people, places, and things, Vodafone IoT enables organisations to thrive in the digital world. Leveraging our expertise in connectivity, our advanced IoT platform, and our extensive global reach, we deliver the results necessary for our customers' progress and success. We support businesses of all sizes and sectors in their efforts to connect for a better future.

The Vodafone Internet of Things (IoT) suite of products and services is specifically designed to meet the demands of emerging business verticals. Our connection base has experienced a 20% year-over-year growth, reaching over 200 million connections by the end of the financial year 2025. Vodafone IoT maintains its leadership as a ten-time consecutive leader in the IoT Connectivity Gartner Magic Quadrant. To address the technological needs of IoT, Vodafone has developed an industry-leading IoT Connectivity Management Platform, targeting key strategic growth opportunities to meet the global requirements of IoT customers.

Vodafone has also carved out the IoT Connectivity business to secure additional external investment and maintain our leading position in the industry through the following:

  • Continue accelerating and enhancing our Platform as a Service for Vodafone customers on footprint
  • Introduce service propositions in markets beyond Vodafone's current footprint
  • Address long tail lower volume segment through digital self-service platform globally

We seek an System Reliability Engineer for our IoT Platform Engineering team. This role reports to the IoT System Performance & Optimization Manager and includes the following responsibilities:

  • Develop and govern resilience strategies that span system architecture, deployment, monitoring, and incident response
  • Define and track stability KPIs (e.g., MTTD, MTTR, error budgets), partnering with performance and operation teams to meet or exceed targets
  • Design and implement fault injection testing, chaos engineering practices, and scenario-based simulations to validate platform robustness
  • Collaborate with product, infrastructure, architecture and development teams to re-design services with built-in redundancy, failover, and graceful degradation
  • Drive automation and observability improvements to reduce noise, increase fault detection speed, and support predictive failure mitigation
  • Contribute to the design and maintenance of our Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (BD/DR), ensuring IoT systems remain resilient and recoverable in the face of unexpected distruptions
  • Own the resilience roadmap and continuously assess emerging threats, technologies, and architectural shifts to guide evolution of stability practices
  • Evangelize a culture of resilience through internal communication, workshops, and post-incident learning programs
  • Engineering excellence – Deliver new capabilities and services efficiently while continuously enhancing the resilience, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of our IoT platform
    • Platform availability and fault tolerance
    • Reduction in recurrence of critical incidents
    • Adoption of engineering best practices aligned with future-proof architecture
  • Delivery focus – Consistently meet or exceed delivery expectations—ensuring the right customer experience, delivering tangible business outcomes, and achieving financial target
    • Improved service-level attainment (SLA/SLO adherence)
    • Reduced mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR)
    • Operational efficiency gains through automation and proactive issue resolution
  • Stakeholder management – Foster trusted, transparent, and outcome-driven relationships with business and technical stakeholders
    • Cross-team alignment on resilience goals, metrics, and ownership
    • Effective communication during incidents and planned changes
    • Stakeholder satisfaction with the stability, predictability, and responsiveness of platform services
    • Improve the Connectivity service delivered to Vodafone IoT customers
    • Assure the proper dimensioning for the owned IoT platforms, guaranteeing capacity is used efficiently
    • Guarantee owned IoT Connectivity platforms can cope with new products being delivered to IoT customers
    • Manage stakeholders and vendors as required for the technical delivery and  report project progress & activities

Who you are

  • Degree in Software Engineer or related discipline with Computer Science 
  • Good understanding of DevSecOps methodology mindset
  • Good understanding of information security
  • Scripting experience such as bash, python, perl, groovy, powershell
  • Proven experience with high-availability system design, chaos engineering principes and proactive failure mitigation strategies
  • Experience with ISO 22301
  • Good understanding of system monitoring tools and automated testing frameworks
  • Industry experience with Software Platforms on Linux, on-premises and cloud Server technologies
  • Deep understanding of SRE principles including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, observability, toil reduction, and automation 
  • Demonstrated ability to balance operational stability with delivery velocity
  • Understanding of security principles, practices and standards and how they translate into real-world technical solutions
  • Hands-on experience with infrastructure provisioning and configuration management tools such as Terraform or Ansible. Demonstrated ability to eliminate manual processes through scripting (e.g., Python, Bash, Go)
  • Strong command of telemetry, logging, and alerting stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, Splunk)
  • Experience defining meaningful SLIs and building dashboards that drive actionable insight
  • Skilled in leading and participating in incident response with a calm, structured approach
  • Experience driving blameless postmortems, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement across teams
  • Good knowledge of DevSecOps principles
  • Expertise in identifying and resolving system bottlenecks, latency issues, and throughput constraints
  • Proficient in forecasting demand and managing system growth in a cost-efficient manner
  • Proven ability to work closely with software engineers, infrastructure teams, product owners, and business stakeholders to embed reliability into the development lifecycle
  • Consultative, customer-focused design mind-set
  • Strong presentation and communication skills, to technical, business and (senior) management audience
  • Strong work planning- and time management skills
  • Willing to learn and a strong sense of ownsership and autonomy

Not a perfect fit?

Worried that you don’t meet all the desired criteria exactly? At Vodafone we are passionate about empowering people and creating a workplace where everyone can thrive, whatever their personal or professional background. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align exactly with every part of the job description, we encourage you to still apply as you may be the right candidate for this role or another opportunity.

What's in it for you

  • Hybrid Work Model - Flexible hybrid work model with 8-10 in-office days per month, managed by team leaders
  • Vodafone Products and Services - Employees get a mobile phone, free communication plan, data card, and various discounts on services and products
  • Recognition - Recognition programs for innovative, creative, high-potential employees and exemplary behaviors
  • Health and Well-being - Well-being Program offers nutrition and psychological consultations, webinars, workshops, and discounts on various services and products
  • Learning - Access to Communities of Practice and a customizable digital training platform with high-quality content (namely Harvard Business Publishing and Skillsoft)
  • Local and International Mobility - Internal recruitment with local and international rotation opportunities across departments and roles

Who we are

We are a leading international Telco, serving millions of customers. At Vodafone, we believe that connectivity is a force for good. If we use it for the things that really matter, it can improve people's lives and the world around us. Through our technology we empower people, connecting everyone regardless of who they are or where they live and we protect the planet, whilst helping our customers do the same.

Belonging at Vodafone isn't a concept; it's lived, breathed, and cultivated through everything we do. You'll be part of a global and diverse community, with many different minds, abilities, backgrounds and cultures. ;We're committed to increase diversity, ensure equal representation, and make Vodafone a place everyone feels safe, valued and included.

If you require any reasonable adjustments or have an accessibility request as part of your recruitment journey, for example, extended time or breaks in between online assessments, please refer to https://careers.vodafone.com/application-adjustments/ for guidance.

Together we can.

Vodafone is committed to attracting, developing and retaining the very best people by offering a motivating and inclusive workplace in which talent is truly recognised and rewarded. We are committed to promoting Inclusion for All with the belief that diversity plays an important role in the success of our business. We actively encourage everyone to consider becoming a part of our journey.