Cloud Lead in City of Westminster

The Cloud Lead is responsible for the stability, availability, and continuous improvement of all non-production and production technology environments across the firm. This role ensures that development, test, staging, and live environments are fit for purpose, secure, well-governed, and aligned to business and delivery needs. Working closely with the wider Technology function, the role leads the operational management of the environments, executing against the strategy and standards set by the owner and enabling reliable software delivery and effective change.

Responsibilities

• Environment Strategy and Governance: Implement and enforce the environments strategy across development, test, UAT, pre-production, and production. Maintain and apply the established standards for environment configuration, access, data usage, refresh cycles, and lifecycle management - escalating the proposed changes to standards for approval before implementing. Ensure environments remain compliant with internal policies, security standards, and regulatory requirements.
• Operational Management: Ensure environments are stable, available, and performant, meeting agreed service levels. Manage environment-related incidents, problems, and escalations, working with the wider Technology teams to resolve issues quickly. Plan and coordinate environment changes to minimise disruption to delivery and live services, operating within established change governance processes.
• Delivery Enablement: Enable efficient software delivery by ensuring environments are available, appropriately sized, and ready for use in line with project and programme schedules. Coordinate environment provisioning and decommissioning to support project and programme delivery. Work closely with release management and DevOps teams to support CI/CD pipelines and deployment practices.
• Stakeholder Management: Serve as the operational point of contact for environment related queries and requests from other tech functions. Build strong working relationships with engineering, architecture, security, testing, and delivery teams to support smooth environment operations. Provide clear and timely communication on environment availability, planned changes, and known risks to relevant teams.
• Risk, Security and Data Management: Ensure appropriate controls are applied around data used in non-production environments, including anonymisation or masking where required, in line with organisation policies and security standards. Identify risks related to environment stability, capacity, and security, documenting and escalating these for ownership and decision-making. Support audits and assurance activities relating to technology environments, providing evidence and documentation as required.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive improvements in environment automation, resilience, and cost efficiency. Identify opportunities to simplify, standardise, or modernise environments. Monitor and report on environment performance, availability, and usage to inform planning and continuous improvements.

Qualifications

• Proven experience managing complex technology environments in a medium to large organisation.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure, cloud platforms (e.g. Azure, GCP), and hosting models.
• Experience working with development, testing, and DevOps teams.
• Knowledge of IT service management practices (incident, problem, change).
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Experience working in regulated or security-conscious environments.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and automation tools is desirable.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and release management is desirable.
• Knowledge of data protection and information security standards is desirable.
• Experience managing third-party suppliers or managed service providers is desirable.
• Takes clear ownership and accountability.
• Pragmatic and delivery-focused, with strong attention to detail.
• Calm and effective under pressure.
• Collaborative and able to influence.
• Proactive in identifying risks and improvement opportunities.
• Ability to communicate effectively with both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders.
• Excellent written skills with the ability to produce high quality documentation.
• Methodical and analytical.
• Pro-active, self-motivated and takes initiative.
• Good problem management skills - able to see a problem through to a solution.
• Capacity to learn, to assimilate information quickly and to acquire new skills.
• Flexible and willing to undertake a wide variety of challenging tasks.
• Highly diligent with focus on the details, with ability to analyse technical challenges and approaches solutions in a systematic fashion.
• Personable and confident - able to build relationships with colleagues and key stakeholders across the business and work with them accordingly.
• Able to work independently and effectively manage own workload with excellent organisational skills.

Company

Mishcon de Reya is an independent law firm, which now employs over 1400 people with more than 650 lawyers offering a wide range of legal services to companies and individuals. The firm has grown rapidly in recent years, showing more than 40% revenue growth in the past five years alone. With presence in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Singapore, Hong Kong and UAE, the firm services an international community of clients and provides advice in situations where the constraints of geography often do not apply. The work the firm undertakes is cross-border, multi-jurisdictional and complex, centred around three increasingly entwined and connected sectors: the Innovation Economy, Private Wealth and Capital, and Real Estate. The firm is known as a disputes powerhouse with a formidable capacity firmwide for dispute resolution. We strive to create a fully diverse and inclusive workplace where all our people are empowered to fulfil their potential. We are proud of our agile working culture and are always happy to talk flexible working.