Cloud Operations Engineer; AWS or Azure Engineering

Job Title

Cloud Operations Engineer (AWS or Azure) - Cheltenham (3 days Office Based)

Finova is the UK’s largest financial services technology provider, supporting one in every five mortgages nationwide. Our agile, cloud-native solutions enable over 60 banks, building societies, specialist lenders, equity release providers and a network of 2,400+ brokers to stay ahead in a competitive market.

Built on open architecture and backed by deep industry expertise, our platform is designed to scale. Each year, we process over £50 billion in loans, manage nearly £50 billion in savings, and support the digital servicing of more than 650,000 UK borrower accounts.

Be part of a team that’s driving innovation, enabling growth and shaping the future of UK lending.

Finova offers a flexible, modular technology suite designed to help lenders move faster, scale efficiently and deliver standout digital experiences.

Financial Institutions use Finova to launch products faster, process applications up to 50% more efficiently and reduce operational costs — all while staying fully compliant in a fast-moving market.

We are looking for an experienced, hands-on Cloud Operations Engineer to join the team responsible for the availability, security, resilience, and performance of our AWS-hosted infrastructure. This is a strictly hands-on, operational role focused on keeping our production environments stable, secure, and performant. You will operate as a core technical practitioner, balancing day-to-day BAU operations and infrastructure changes with continuous improvements to our resilience, automation, monitoring, and security posture.

If you thrive in a busy environment, enjoy collaborating with development and security teams, and have a strong bias toward operational discipline, we want to hear from you.

• AWS Expertise: Proven hands-on experience managing AWS-hosted production environments, particularly compute (EC2, ECS), Application Load Balancers (ALB), and networking (VPCs, Security Groups, routing).
• Core Infrastructure
  
  Skills:
  
  Strong technical competency in Windows Server administration and foundational networking/load-balancing principles.
• SQL Server
  
  Experience:
  
  Operational support knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server (
  
  Note:
  
  This is not a DBA role, but requires comfort with basic triage and monitoring).
• Automation & CI/CD: Hands-on experience executing, supporting, and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation issues.
• Observability Tooling: Proficiency with monitoring systems like Datadog, Amazon Cloud Watch, AWS X-Ray, or similar tools.
• Process-Driven Mindset: A highly disciplined approach to change management, access control, and operational governance, ideally within a regulated environment.

• Infrastructure Management: Operate and support our AWS production and non-production environments, focusing heavily on compute services (EC2, ECS), VPC Networking, and storage.
• Incident Response & Triage: Act as the 1st and 2nd line of defense for platform/application issues. Participate in an out-of-hours on-call rotation for P1/P2 incidents and scheduled deployments.
• Change & Release Support: Execute approved infrastructure changes following strict security controls. Support delivery teams with automated deployments and troubleshoot failed or degraded CI/CD releases.
• Database Support: Provide operational support for Microsoft SQL Server (health checks, job monitoring, basic triage, backup verification) and collaborate with DBA teams for deeper optimizations.
• Monitoring & Observability: Own and optimize monitoring tools (Datadog, Cloud Watch, AWS X-Ray) to catch genuine service-impacting issues while reducing alert fatigue.
• Security & Compliance: Assess and remediate vulnerabilities, assist with compliance audits (ISO, regulatory assurance), and contribute to incident post-mortems.
• Disaster Recovery: Support resilience activities, including failover testing, game days, and the validation of recovery runbooks.

• Hybrid working We operate on a hybrid model that is primarily office-based, requiring three days in the office each week, with the…