Senior Cloud Engineer

Job Description

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to join our platform team as a hands-on third line technical specialist. This is not a generalist role — we want someone who has been deep in the engine room: diagnosing production incidents under pressure, untangling networking edge cases that defeat everyone else, and building the infrastructure that teams depend on daily.

You will be the technical escalation point for complex cloud infrastructure issues, owning problems from first triage through to root cause and lasting fix — not just restoring service and moving on. You'll also contribute to the platforms and automation that reduce the frequency of those escalations in the first place, turning hard‑won experience into better systems.

We are particularly keen to hear about the incidents and fixes you are proud of — the ones that required real diagnostic depth, creative thinking under pressure, or the courage to make a significant change in production. If you have a story that demonstrates what you are capable of at your best, this is the role where that matters.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Deployment: Deploy, implement, and manage secure, scalable, and resilient AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform through Git Lab.
• Cloud Automation: Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines in Git Lab to automate infrastructure delivery, testing, and compliance checks. Write supporting automation in Bash and Python using Terraform as the primary provisioning tool, reducing manual toil and enforcing consistent, repeatable deployments across all environments.
• Containerisation and Application Delivery: Manage containerised workloads running on Kubernetes, using Helm for packaging and ArgoCD to drive Git Ops-based continuous delivery. Own the reliability of the deployment pipeline from image build through to production rollout, troubleshooting scheduling, networking, and configuration issues across the cluster.
• Cost Management: Monitor infrastructure costs, analyse usage patterns, and propose optimisations to reduce cloud spend and eliminate waste.
• Multi-Account Management: Oversee and maintain multiple AWS accounts, ensuring governance, compliance, and consistency across environments.
• Troubleshooting & Incident Response: Own third line escalations across compute, networking, storage, and Kubernetes layers — diagnosing root causes, not just restoring service. Produce post-incident reviews that convert hard-won fixes into permanent platform improvements and team knowledge.
• Stakeholder
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Communicate infrastructure decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders, translating risk, complexity, and trade-offs into plain language. Produce documentation that is genuinely useful — runbooks, architecture notes, and post-incident summaries — not documentation for its own sake.
• Security & Compliance: Implement security best practices and ensure AWS environments adhere to organisational and regulatory requirements.
• Continuous Improvement: Actively track developments in AWS services, Terraform, and Kubernetes — evaluating new capabilities against real platform needs and proposing changes that deliver measurable improvement, not just novelty.
• On-Call & UK Shift Flexibility: Participate in the on-call ROTA and demonstrate flexibility to work in a UK shift environment occasionally, as needed.

What We’re Looking For

• Minimum 5 years of hands‑on experience in cloud infrastructure and services with a preference to AWS.
• Deep understanding of networking, security, and cloud architecture — able to design, critique, and debug at the architecture level, not just implement to a pattern.
• Proven experience with Terraform – capable of writing reusable modules and customising existing codebases.
• Strong understanding of Containerisation and delivery mechanisms including Docker, Kubernetes and Cloud PaaS Containerisation Solutions.
• Practical experience with EC2, S3, Route
  53, VPC, Lambda, Cloud Watch, IAM
  , and other AWS services.
• Proven third line troubleshooting capability — able to diagnose complex, cross-layer issues spanning compute, networking, storage, and application…