Lead Cloud & DevOps Engineer

Blend
360 is a premier data, AI, and marketing consulting firm that partners with the world's most ambitious organizations to turn complex challenges into competitive advantage. We sit at the intersection of deep analytical rigor and pragmatic business execution—helping Fortune 1000 companies and Private Equity-backed businesses unlock transformational value through data, technology, and human expertise.

This is an hourly/temporary position that could become permanent over time.

We are looking for an experienced Senior Cloud & Dev Ops Engineer to support the build and production readiness of a foundational AWS data platform for a large telecommunications client. This role will focus on provisioning and operating the core AWS infrastructure, including data ingestion and orchestration services, data lake and analytics platforms, and establishing the CI/CD pipelines, environment management, monitoring, and operational controls needed to take the platform through Development, Test, and Production.

The ideal candidate will have strong expertise in AWS-native architecture, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), release engineering, observability, and secure platform operations in regulated environments. This person will work closely with Data Engineers, BI Consultants, and Governance leads to ensure the platform is deployable, scalable, secure, and aligned with enterprise compliance and security standards.

• Design and implement AWS cloud infrastructure and deployment patterns for the data platform, including multi-account AWS Organizations strategy, IAM design, networking, naming conventions, and tagging standards.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support repeatable, controlled releases across Development, Test, and Production environments.
• Provision and configure AWS infrastructure as code (Terraform), including services such as AWS Glue, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, VPC networking, VPN/Direct Connect connectivity, Route 53, security groups, and firewall controls to connect on-premises source systems.
• Configure Git-based integration and deployment workflows for platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake to enforce version-controlled deployments.
• Support deployment of backend services, orchestration components, data services, APIs, and front-end applications.
• Enable monitoring, logging, alerting, and telemetry using services such as Amazon Cloud Watch, AWS Cloud Trail, AWS Config, and observability platforms like Datadog.
• Define and implement operational controls for reliability, performance, scalability, backup/recovery, and incident response.
• Implement and enforce secure access patterns using AWS IAM, IAM Identity Center (AWS SSO), AWS Secrets Manager, AWS KMS, and policy-driven access controls, including row-level and column-level security requirements where applicable.
• Ensure the solution aligns with architecture, security, governance, and service transition requirements.
• Support non-functional testing, release readiness, and path-to-production activities.
• Produce comprehensive operational runbooks, platform documentation, and a full IaC handover package enabling the client’s internal IT team to take ownership of platform operations at programme close.
• Support cost management, network performance tuning, and security hardening of the AWS platform; contribute to Fin Ops reporting and disaster recovery planning.

• Strong hands‑on experience with CI/CD tooling and release automation.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code using Terraform or similar tools.
• Hands‑on experience deploying and operating cloud-native workloads in AWS, including services such as AWS Glue, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ECS/EKS, AWS Lambda, IAM, and VPC networking.
• Experience with Databricks and/or Snowflake deployments in AWS environments.
• Strong understanding of containerisation, serverless architectures, managed compute services, and environment promotion strategies.
• Experience with observability tooling covering logging, monitoring, alerting, and service health.
• Knowledge of security best practices including IAM, RBAC, secrets management, encryption, and policy‑driven access control.
• Experience supporting…