Senior Cloud Engineer

Job Title Senior Cloud Engineer Job Description The Senior Cloud Engineer plays a critical role in maintaining, optimising, and evolving PL Re's cloud-hosted application workloads, with a primary focus on AWS. This is a high-impact, hands-on role responsible for operational excellence, security, reliability, and lifecycle management of cloud applications across multiple regions. The role sits at the intersection of cloud architecture, SRE, security, and developer experience, helping to raise the overall standard of cloud usage across PL Re.

While experience in platform provisioning is required, this role does not focus on building or owning the core platform itself, but instead on operating, improving, and enabling solutions running on it in line with enterprise standards, Cloud Shared Services and governance expectations

Lead and deliver complex cloud and platform initiatives, taking ideas from concept through to production, resolving dependencies and ensuring reliable outcomes.

Operate and evolve a global AWS application environment, supporting workloads across multiple regions within local business hours, and participating in out-of-hours on-call rotas as required.

Support the full lifecycle of application workloads, including maintenance, patching, backups, upgrades, and controlled decommissioning.

Drive improvements in reliability, resilience, performance, and efficiency through strong SRE practices.

Own and enhance observability and monitoring, ensuring meaningful alerting, clear operational dashboards, and rapid diagnosis of incidents.

Raise the bar for operational maturity, including incident management, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement.

Ensure workloads are designed, deployed, and operated in line with cloud security, compliance, and governance requirements.

Work closely with Information Security and Enterprise Architecture to ensure alignment with PL Re and Pacific Life standards.

Maintain up-to-date technical and architectural documentation to support governance reviews and audit requirements.

Collaborate with application and engineering teams to guide and influence cloud architecture decisions, ensuring a smooth, low-friction path to production.

Improve developer experience and tooling, including CI/CD pipelines, automation, and standardised patterns.

Contribute to the definition of cloud design patterns, policies, and standards, feeding into wider platform strategy and governance.

Potentially take on line or technical leadership responsibilities as the platform engineering capability matures working with an Enterprise wide leadership and team structure.

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating distributed AWS environments, including networking, IAM, security, observability, and monitoring.
• Strong hands-on experience with cloud security, compliance, and governance in enterprise or regulated environments.
• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and automation tooling.
• Hands-on expertise in SRE and operational excellence, including monitoring, alerting, reliability improvement, and incident response.
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives end-to-end, balancing robustness, efficiency, and developer usability.
• Experience operating and supporting Kubernetes-based workloads in AWS.

• Experience supporting data, analytics, or modelling workloads in cloud environments.
• Familiarity with enterprise architecture principles and working within formal governance frameworks.
• Exposure to financial services, insurance, underwriting, or actuarial technology environments.
• Experience improving developer experience through tooling, templates, and platform capabilities.

• Strong sense of ownership and accountability for operational outcomes.
• Clear, pragmatic communicator able to work effectively with engineers, architects, and risk stakeholders.
• Ability to lead through influence, setting practical standards and encouraging good cloud practice.
• Calm, analytical approach to problem-solving in production and incident scenarios.

• Stable, secure, and well-operated AWS application workloads aligned to PL Re standards.
• Improved reliability, security posture, and operational maturity across cloud-hosted solutions.
• Reduced friction for delivery teams through better tooling, guidance, and cloud enablement.

Every person in our global team is valued for the unique qualities they bring to our business and we seek to build their expertise and support their individual ambitions at every step. Of course, we take our work seriously and we know our team can operate under great pressure. We work hard and thrive on achievement, but we also know how to have fun and relax too.

We regularly host a range of team…