Senior AWS Cloud Engineer – Data & AI Domain – Milton Keynes (UK)
The Data & AI Domain is looking for a Senior AWS Cloud Engineer based in Milton Keynes. In this role, you will be responsible for engineering, operating, and evolving the AWS data lake platform, including the cloud infrastructure, shared services and data engineering applications that sit on top of it. You will work closely with data engineering, analytics, security and architecture teams to ensure the platform is secure, resilient, cost‑effective and scalable, enabling teams to deliver data products safely and efficiently.
Responsibilities
- Engineering and operating the AWS data lake infrastructure, ensuring high availability, resilience, performance and security.
- Designing, building and maintaining Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for AWS environments, shared services and data platform components.
- Managing and supporting data lake platform services and applications, including ingestion frameworks, processing engines and access layers.
- Implementing and maintaining cloud‑native security controls, including IAM, encryption, network controls and policy enforcement.
- Supporting DevOps and platform automation, including CI/CD pipelines, environment provisioning and release management.
- Monitoring, tuning and optimising platform performance, reliability and cost within a FinOps‑aligned operating model.
- Providing operational support and engineering improvements for data lake workloads (batch, streaming and interactive analytics).
- Working closely with data engineering and analytics teams to enable safe, repeatable deployment of data pipelines and applications.
- Collaborating with enterprise architecture, security and risk teams to ensure solutions align with group standards and regulatory expectations.
- Contributing to platform standards, reference architectures, engineering patterns and operational runbooks.
Qualifications
Professional Experience
- Experience with Agentic AI in an ELT/ETL capacity.
- Exposure to Kafka or streaming platforms from an infrastructure or operational perspective.
- Experience with observability tooling (logging, metrics, alerting) for cloud platforms.
- Understanding of FinOps, cost optimisation and capacity management in AWS.
- Familiarity with data governance tooling such as data catalogues or access control frameworks.
- Experience working in Agile/product‑aligned teams. Working knowledge of JIRA.
- Minimum of seven years of relevant experience demonstrating delivery expertise.
Education
- Desirable: AWS certification (e.g. AWS Solutions Architect – Associate/Professional, or AWS Data Engineer).
Languages
- English – Preferred.
- Spanish – Preferred.
Hard Skills
- Practical experience with AWS cloud architecture, including services like S3, IAM, VPC, KMS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Glue, Athena, EMR, Lambda, Step Functions and SageMaker.
- Skilled in SQL and NoSQL databases for implementing data warehouses and data lakes.
- Experienced in data ingestion, processing, transformation and delivery using batch, streaming and real‑time methods.
- Experience supporting Spark‑based platforms (e.g. EMR, Glue, Databricks).
- Proficient with DevOps tools and practices (Git, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes) as well as ETL frameworks (Apache Spark, Airflow, AWS IoT Analytics/Device Management/Events).
- Programming expertise in Python, Java, Scala, SQL, Spark, Unix shell scripting and AWS CLI.
- Hands‑on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK) and CI/CD tooling (Git, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CodePipeline).
- Solid understanding of cloud security – identity and access management, encryption and network isolation.
- Supports batched, streaming and near‑real‑time data workloads from platform and infrastructure perspectives.
- Confident operating platforms in regulated or controlled environments.
Soft Skills
- Ability to influence Delivery Managers and technical leads without direct management control.
- Confident engaging senior stakeholders with clear, decision‑led updates.
- Skilled at balancing competing priorities and driving alignment.
- Comfortable challenging plans constructively and diplomatically.
Compensation & Benefits
- Salary Range: £80,000 – £120,000 per annum (depending on experience).
- 30 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, increasing to 31 days after 5 years of service; option to purchase up to 5 contractual days per year.
- £6,000 car allowance per year.
- Company‑funded private medical insurance and protection for you and your family (including death‑in‑service benefit and income protection insurance).
- Option to take advantage of discounted rates for additional life assurance and critical illness cover.
- Share plans and employee product benefits such as Edge Current Accounts and Credit Cards with no fees.
EEO & Work‑Location
At Santander, we’re proud to be an inclusive organisation that provides equal opportunities for everyone – regardless of age, gender, disability, civil status, race, religion or sexual orientation. Our roles are site‑based with a hybrid working pattern, where colleagues are expected to attend the office at least 12 days per month (pro‑rated for part‑time roles). Right to work in the UK is required to commence employment.
Legal Statement
To comply with statutory requirements, this posting is provided in accordance with applicable employment regulations. The information provided is accurate as of the date of posting.
