Senior Cloud Platform Engineer

Sword is a leading provider of business technology solutions within the Energy, Public and Finance Sectors, driving real transformation change within our clients. We use proven technology, specialist teams and domain expertise to build solid technical foundations across platforms, data and business applications. We have a passion for using technology to solve business problems, working in partnership with our clients to help in achieving their goals.

Sword is looking for a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer to take operational ownership of public cloud and hybrid cloud services across our managed customer environments.

This is a hands-on senior engineering role for someone who understands what it takes to run production cloud services. You'll work across cloud platforms, hybrid connectivity, identity, governance, security, automation, monitoring, backup and recovery. Your focus will be service health, resilience and continual improvement, rather than completing isolated technical tasks.

You’ll act as a senior technical escalation point for complex incidents, major service issues and high-priority requests. We need someone who can diagnose problems across cloud, network, identity, security, infrastructure and application dependencies, restore service under pressure and then address the underlying cause. Closing the ticket isn’t enough if the problem is likely to return.

• Own the operational health, reliability, security and continual improvement of customer public cloud and hybrid cloud services.
• Operate and maintain services across major public cloud platforms, covering compute, storage, networking, identity, security, monitoring, backup and recovery.
• Support hybrid cloud environments connecting public cloud services with on-premises data centres, private cloud platforms, edge locations and legacy systems.
• Manage the technical dependencies between cloud platforms, virtualization, operating systems, networks, identity services, databases and applications.
• Apply and improve cloud governance controls, including policy, access management, configuration standards, compliance monitoring, resource classification and cost oversight.
• Develop and maintain automation and infrastructure-as-code for deployment, configuration, validation, remediation, reporting and recurring operational tasks.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for complex incidents, performance issues and service failures spanning public cloud and hybrid environments.
• Identify root causes, recurring failures, configuration drift, capacity constraints and technical debt, then drive corrective and preventative action.
• Plan and implement controlled platform changes, assessing security, resilience, interoperability, performance, cost, service impact and ongoing supportability.
• Support onboarding and service transition by ensuring environments are documented, observable, recoverable, governed and ready for live managed service operation, while providing technical leadership and mentoring across the engineering team.
• Typically 5+ years’ experience in enterprise IT operations, managed services, consultancy or complex in-house environments, with substantial responsibility for production public cloud and hybrid cloud services.
• Relevant professional certifications across major public cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, at administrator, engineer, security, networking or architect level.
• ITIL Foundation or an equivalent service-management qualification, supported by practical experience of incident, problem, change, service request and knowledge management.
• Strong technical knowledge of public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud architectures, including compute, storage, networking,…