Lead Cloud Platform Engineer in Manchester

Working at CreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference while always putting people first. We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years.

Our UK Benefits:

• 35 days leave (including bank holidays).
• Private medical insurance.
• Enhanced parental and adoption leave.
• Financial coaching + 5% pension match.
• 40 hours of paid learning and development.

CreateFuture is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row. Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today.

About the role and team: A hands-on Lead engineer embedded in the client's platform team, responsible for the reliability, scalability, and evolution of their Kubernetes-based infrastructure on AWS. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and DevOps, owning the day-to-day health of containerised workloads while driving improvements to delivery pipelines, GitOps practices, and managed service configuration. The right candidate is comfortable working autonomously in a mature, opinionated stack and can influence without authority across engineering teams. This role combines deep hands-on expertise with team leadership, stakeholder engagement, and delivery planning. The right candidate can operate credibly at an engineering level while also communicating clearly with business and technical stakeholders, translating platform priorities into a coherent roadmap and ensuring the team has the clarity and support needed to deliver effectively.

What you'll be doing:

• Own the platform engineering roadmap, working with business and technical stakeholders to prioritise initiatives, surface risks, and align delivery against wider programme goals.
• Lead and mentor a team of platform engineers, providing technical guidance, supporting growth, and maintaining quality and consistency across the team's output.
• Act as the primary technical point of contact for platform-related matters across engineering, product, and operations teams.
• Support on call for the EKS platform.
• Own the operational health and evolution of containerised workloads running on EKS, including Helm chart management and Kustomize-based environment configuration.
• Drive GitOps practices using Flux, maintaining, improving, and troubleshooting the reconciliation pipeline across environments.
• Manage and optimise core managed services: EKS, MSK, and RDS, including scaling, patching, cost governance, and incident response.
• Maintain and extend infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, ensuring consistency, modularity, and alignment with AWS best practices.
• Support and improve GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows, including build, test, and deployment pipelines for containerised applications.
• Collaborate with development teams to support the hosting, debugging, and performance of Java/Kotlin and Python-based services.
• Identify and address platform-level technical debt, contributing to a roadmap of incremental improvements.

What you bring:

• Kubernetes at production scale, EKS preferred, with strong understanding of networking, RBAC, resource management, and cluster operations.
• GitOps tooling, Flux (essential), with solid working knowledge of Helm and Kustomize.
• AWS managed services, hands-on experience with EKS, MSK, and RDS in production environments.
• Terraform, authoring and maintaining modular infrastructure-as-code across multiple environments.
• GitHub Actions, building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for containerised workloads.
• Application-layer awareness, ability to support and troubleshoot Java/Kotlin and/or Python services running in containers.
• Strong operational mindset, with experience owning incident management, on-call frameworks, and post-incident review processes.
• Proven experience leading a platform or infrastructure engineering team, including mentoring, performance support, and day-to-day team management.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, able to engage confidently with technical and non-technical audiences, translate complexity into clear priorities, and manage competing demands.

What we’ll offer you: We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.

Our hiring process: We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. It usually looks like this: Call with our Talent Acquisition Team, Role specific capability interview. Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens.

Inclusion at CreateFuture: We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just let us know. We will do what we can to help. We look forward to your application!