Head of Cloud Platform

Job Type: Permanent

Location: Telford, Birmingham, London or Edinburgh with a preference for 2-3 days in the office.

Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process.

Salary and benefits: Up to £140,000, discretionary bonus, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.

Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.

We’re looking for a Head of Cloud Platform responsible for cloud across the estate, setting direction and guardrails that enable engineering teams to deliver secure, resilient and cost-effective solutions, embedding security as a core design principle across platforms, engineering practices and AI/ML capabilities.

In our Engineering & Transformation function, you will take a hands-on approach to architecture leadership, bringing deep technical expertise in cloud platforms (particularly AWS) to design, build and deploy prototypes and reference solutions that engineering teams can adopt and scale.

What are we looking for?

• Deep, hands-on expertise across AWS services and cloud-native architectures with a proven ability to design, build and deploy cloud-native solutions and prototypes.
• Define cloud strategy, principles and target architectures aligned to business priorities, Group Enterprise Architecture and AI strategy, driving a technically grounded roadmap based on deep AWS knowledge and cost models.
• Establish clear standards and guardrails for engineering teams whilst designing, building and deploying secure-by-design prototypes and reference implementations using cloud-native services.
• Drive simplification across the estate whilst ensuring alignment across engineering, data, AI and security.
• Act as the architectural authority for cloud and AI direction whilst influencing through demonstrable solutions and working implementations.
• Embed security, resilience and compliance into cloud and AI architecture, patterns and engineering practices whilst defining and implementing secure-by-design principles aligned to internal standards and external frameworks.
• Strong understanding of cloud security principles and embedding security into engineering practices and pipelines whilst driving and defining standards for CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability and security.

We want to hire the whole version of you. We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you. If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.