Senior Cloud Platform Engineer

We’re looking for a senior, hands-on Cloud Platform Engineer to design, standardise, and operate cloud platforms that underpin multiple AI-driven products and services. This role is about building well-defined, reusable platform patterns that enable delivery teams to move quickly while maintaining high standards of reliability, security, and cost control. You’ll play a key role in shaping how AI and cloud services are built, deployed, and operated across several concurrent initiatives, reducing fragmentation and improving consistency across the platform estate. This is a hands-on technical role for someone who enjoys making strong architectural decisions, establishing clear standards, and balancing flexibility with standardisation in a fast-moving environment.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Platform Architecture & Standardisation
  • Design and implement well-defined architecture patterns for cloud-native and AI-enabled services on AWS
  • Create and maintain reusable blueprints for common service types and workloads
  • Drive consistency across multiple projects through shared modules, templates, and platform tooling
  • Define standards for service deployment, integration, communication, and day-to-day operations
• Infrastructure as Code & Automation
  • Build and maintain Terraform-based infrastructure, with a strong emphasis on modular, reusable design
  • Define CI/CD patterns for:
    • Infrastructure provisioning and change management
    • Application and model deployment
  • Enforce best practices through pipelines and automation, rather than documentation alone
• Reliability, Observability & Operations
  • Embed SRE principles across all services, including:
    • Monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing
    • SLIs, SLOs, and actionable alerting
  • Continuously improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
  • Operate and evolve API gateway and data plane technologies (e.g. Kong)

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong experience operating AWS-based platforms in production
• Proven expertise with Terraform, including module design and CI/CD integration
• Hands-on experience with container platforms:
  • ECS preferred; EKS acceptable if adaptable
• Experience operating API gateways (Kong or equivalent)
• Solid understanding of cloud networking, service discovery, and communication patterns
• Experience supporting multiple teams or projects on a shared platform
• Strong troubleshooting skills and real-world production operations experience

AI / Data Platform Experience (Required)

• Practical experience running or supporting AI/ML workloads in production, such as:
  • Model inference services
  • Batch or streaming processing pipelines
  • Integrations with LLM APIs or managed model services
• Strong understanding of:
  • Scaling characteristics of AI workloads
  • Cost drivers for compute-heavy and GPU-based workloads
• Familiarity with:
  • Model serving frameworks
  • Data processing pipelines
  • AWS managed AI / ML services

Desirable Experience

• GPU workloads or specialised compute environments
• Feature stores, vector databases, or embedding pipelines
• Event-driven architectures
• Cloud security best practices (IAM, secrets management, Zero Trust)
• Platform engineering or internal developer platform experience

Behaviours

• An open and genuine communicator
• Able to take responsibility for your actions
• Always learning and wanting to improve
• Takes responsibility for own development
• Love what you do
• Value and support your team
• Embrace who you are
• Open minded and willing to explore new ideas

What We Offer

We value our team and to attract exceptional people, we offer an excellent package. As a Leighton Employee You Can Look Forward To:

• A competitive salary dependent on experience
• A contributory pension scheme
• Private healthcare
• 25 days annual leave, plus bank holidays and the opportunity to buy or sell holiday
• A flexible approach to working hours
• Continuous personal development, career path and training