Head of Cloud Platform Engineering

Flui Technologies is a leading software solution provider to the energy and water sector, delivering innovative and scalable software infrastructure and services since 1990. Our solutions - MarketFlow, MeterFlow and DCC adapter - support market competition, smart metering, network flexibility and supplier integration across Energy Retail, Energy Networks and Water Retail, and are used to manage messaging for more than 35 million electricity and gas meter points, with millions of records processed per day.

As the utility sector evolves to meet the challenges of Net Zero, Smart Metering, Energy Code reform, Market-wide Half-Hourly Settlement, Demand-side Response and Embedded Generation, we combine deep industry knowledge with technical innovation to deliver robust, business-focused solutions backed by dedicated people and exceptional support. We are certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022, reflecting our commitment to protecting data and managing risk.

The Head of Cloud Platform Engineering owns the operations and component-level architecture of Flui's AWS cloud estate - the infrastructure that underpins software processing critical market and metering data at national scale. This is a hands-on role: you will design, build and run cloud-native platforms combining AWS-native services with open-source components, and carry end-to-end accountability for how that estate performs, costs, and stands up to scrutiny.

Beyond architecture and operations, you will own FinOps and security for the cloud estate, and act as the accountable owner for its overall fitness for purpose - resilience, performance and scalability - as Flui's platforms scale to support a growing and increasingly complex utility market. You will work closely with the engineering leadership to ensure architecture decisions serve both the product roadmap and the operational realities of running critical infrastructure.

The role suits someone who wants to remain genuinely hands-on with design and build, while holding single-point accountability for how well the cloud estate is run, secured and paid for.

Job Responsibilities

• Owning the component-level architecture of Flui's AWS cloud estate, spanning AWS-native services and open-source/self-managed components (e.g. container orchestration, messaging, data stores, observability tooling).
• Operating and continuously improving the platforms underpinning MarketFlow, MeterFlow and DCC adapter, with direct accountability for their resilience, performance and scalability at national-scale transaction volumes.
• Designing and maintaining disaster recovery, high-availability and capacity plans appropriate to platforms supporting critical utility market infrastructure.
• Owning FinOps for the cloud estate: cost visibility, forecasting, tagging and allocation, and driving measurable, ongoing cost optimisation without compromising reliability.
• Owning cloud security posture: identity and access management, network security, encryption, vulnerability and patch management, and ensuring the estate operates in line with Flui's ISO/IEC 27001 ISMS and wider compliance obligations.
• Defining and maintaining the non-functional standards ('fitness for purpose') that platforms must meet - resilience, performance, scalability and observability - and holding engineering teams to them through architecture review and guardrails.
• Remaining hands-on: designing, building and, where appropriate, personally implementing infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines and platform tooling alongside the wider engineering team.
• Owning operational rigor for the estate - incident management, on-call practice, root-cause analysis and continuous improvement of SRE practices.
• Making and owning build-vs-buy and AWS-native-vs-open-source decisions, balancing cost, control, operability and vendor lock-in.
• Managing key vendor and technical relationships, including AWS itself and providers of critical open-source or commercial platform tooling.
• Partnering with the product/engineering leadership to ensure cloud architecture decisions support the product roadmap and time-to-market, and recruiting/developing a small, high-calibre platform engineering team as the estate grows.
• Championing knowledge sharing and technical education across engineering - documenting architecture decisions and standards, running internal sessions on cloud and platform practice, and mentoring engineers and technical colleagues to raise the wider team's capability.

Essential Competencies and Experience

• Demonstrable experience owning cloud platforms supporting a regulated, high-availability or critical-infrastructure business.
• Ability to balance technical excellence with commercial and operational reality - cost, risk, and delivery pace.
• Understanding of the utility/energy sector's data and resilience expectations is an advantage.
• Deep, hands-on AWS expertise across compute, storage, networking, data and security services, ideally evidenced by current AWS certification(s).
• Proven experience designing and operating cloud-native platforms that combine AWS-native services with open-source components (e.g. Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka or equivalent messaging, Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent observability).
• Track record of owning a FinOps practice and delivering demonstrable, sustained cloud cost savings.
• Strong cloud security background - IAM, encryption, vulnerability management - and familiarity with compliance frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001.
• Experience defining and meeting non-functional requirements: high availability, disaster recovery, performance/load testing and scalability at production scale.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code skills (Terraform, CloudFormation or CDK) and mature CI/CD practice.
• Comfortable operating hands-on day to day while also owning strategy, standards and team development.
• A track record of sharing knowledge and raising technical capability across a team or wider engineering community - through documentation, mentoring, or internal training.
• Willingness to participate in on-call/incident response as needed for platforms supporting critical services.

Job Qualifications

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline is a bonus, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Current AWS certification(s) - e.g. Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional or Security Specialty - highly desirable.

Your Personal Characteristics Will Include

• A pragmatic engineer-leader: hands-on by instinct, comfortable balancing strategic ownership with keyboard time.
• Security and cost-conscious by default, without losing sight of reliability and delivery speed.
• Calm and structured under pressure, with a methodical approach to incident response.
• Curious and current - actively tracks the evolving cloud and open-source ecosystem.
• Advocates simplicity and resists unnecessary complexity or over-engineering.
• A clear communicator, able to translate technical trade-offs into business terms for the leadership team.
• A natural teacher and mentor, who enjoys raising the technical capability of colleagues and peers, not just delivering the work themselves.