Cloud Operations Specialist

Old Mutual is a firm believer in the African opportunity and our diverse talent reflects this.

The Cloud Operations Specialist is responsible for managing and maintaining Old Mutual's cloud infrastructure, ensuring high availability, performance, and security. The role is primarily operational in nature—focused on monitoring, incident response, system maintenance, patching, and the reliable day‑to‑day running of cloud platforms and shared services. Cloud Operations Specialists work closely with Cloud Engineers, consuming and extending the automation tooling and infrastructure built by engineering teams.

They are expected to write and maintain operational scripts, but their primary output is stable, well‑operated cloud environments. A key ongoing responsibility of this role is cloud cost management and Fin Ops practice. Cloud Operations Specialists are the primary owners of day‑to‑day spend visibility, waste identification, rightsizing, and cost reporting. Optimising cloud spend is a continuous operational discipline embedded in the daily and weekly rhythm of the role.

• Manage and maintain cloud infrastructure to ensure high availability, performance, and security.
• Assist in the deployment, configuration, and management of cloud resources in line with engineering‑defined standards.
• Perform regular system maintenance, updates, backups, and patching to keep cloud environments secure and up‑to‑date.
• Manage infrastructure availability, resilience, and disaster recovery procedures.

• Monitor cloud systems and services to ensure optimal performance.
• Implement and manage monitoring systems and reporting in line with engineering‑defined requirements.
• Monitor, report, and manage cloud platform and shared services capacity.
• Optimize cloud resource usage and costs, providing recommendations for improvements.
• Monitor cost and usage dashboards daily; identify anomalies, unexpected spend spikes, or untagged resources and elevate or remediate promptly.
• Continuously monitor infrastructure, applications, and services using enterprise monitoring tools (Dynatrace, Cloud Watch, Grafana).
• Identify anomalies, performance degradation, and failures, and initiate corrective actions.
• Morning health checks for core Wealth applications.

• Respond to and resolve cloud‑related incidents and service requests per SLA.
• Participate in on‑call rotations to provide 24/7 support for critical cloud operations.
• Perform Tier‑2 troubleshooting and Escalate complex or recurring issues to Cloud Engineering for root cause analysis and remediation.
• Collaborate with development and engineering teams to support cloud‑based applications and services.

• Cloud cost optimisation is a core responsibility—manage and reduce cloud spend as part of regular work.
• Contribute to cloud cost visibility tooling and dashboards (AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing, Custom Implementations), ensuring spend is accurately tagged and attributable to teams, products, and environments.
• Perform regular reviews (at minimum once per sprint) of cloud spend to identify waste, idle resources, oversized instances, unattached storage, and unused reservations.
• Execute rightsizing recommendations generated by cloud‑native tooling and engineering—resize, downgrade, or terminate resources within agreed operational parameters.
• Consult on Reserved Instance, Savings Plan, Committed Use Discount coverage, flagging expiries and utilisation gaps to Fin Ops and management.
• Enforce and monitor resource tagging compliance; identify and remediate untagged or incorrectly tagged resources using automation tooling provided by engineering.
• Consult and operate automated cost governance policies (budget alerts, anomaly detection rules, resource lifecycle schedules such as start/stop automation).
• Identify and implement quick‑win cost reduction opportunities (storage tier transitions, snapshot cleanup, log retention enforcement) within operational authority.
• Contribute operational context and findings to quarterly Fin Ops reviews and…