Cloud & Platform Engineering Lead in Manchester

Moorepay is transforming. We are a trusted leader in UK Payroll and HR solutions, but we aren't resting on our history. We are embarking on a major digital transformation to redefine how businesses manage their most important asset: their people.

The Cloud & Platform Engineering Lead will ensure the reliability, scalability, and security of our engineering systems. Working closely with the Engineering Manager and Head of Engineering, the Platform Lead will identify priorities to remove friction from engineering teams, streamline processes, and enhance operational excellence. This role combines software engineering principles with systems administration to deliver robust, automated, cost-effective, and secure-by-design solutions.

The Cloud & Platform Engineering Lead plays a critical role in ensuring that our AI-driven, cloud-native platform is reliable, observable, secure, and able to scale with the organisation’s growth. As we adopt intelligent agents, autonomous workflows, and increasingly complex distributed systems, the Platform Lead ensures that resilience, performance, and operational excellence are built into everything we deliver. By partnering closely with Engineers, Architects, and the Engineering Manager, the SRE defines the patterns, tooling, and automation that enable fast, safe, and repeatable deployments.

This role safeguards our production environment, drives continuous improvement across CI/CD and observability, and establishes reliability practices that empower autonomous squads to move quickly without compromising stability. The Platform Lead is essential to maintaining customer trust, supporting AI-first innovation, and ensuring our platform remains robust, secure, and highly available on a scale.

This is a full time, permanent role working on a hybrid basis with 3 days per week in Manchester.

• Define and deliver cloud and platform architectures aligned with enterprise patterns and security frameworks.
• Produce Low-Level Designs and ensure alignment with High-Level Designs.
• Drive adoption of automation, Infrastructure as Code and reusable solution patterns.
• Provide expert guidance on cloud-native architectures, containerisation and modern engineering practices.
• Build, maintain and optimise CI/CD pipelines.
• Enhance observability through logging, alerting and monitoring.
• Ensure platform services scale with evolving business demands.
• Support operational readiness across all environments.
• Lead cost‑efficient design, provisioning and operation of cloud and platform services.
• Implement tagging standards, usage reporting, budget alerts and governance controls.
• Identify and eliminate underutilised or unnecessary spend.
• Drive adoption of autoscaling, rightsizing, reserved instances and savings plans.
• Collaborate with Finance on forecasting and cost reviews.
• Define and evolve the Cloud Delivery Roadmap.
• Maintain a Cloud Service Catalogue aligned to KPIs and SLAs.
• Embed continuous improvement across cloud and platform services.
• Collaborate with Architecture, Group Technology, Service Management, Product and Portfolio teams.
• Communicate technical plans, risks and performance updates.
• Manage third‑party cloud partners.
• Lead, coach and develop a high‑performing engineering team.
• Support career development and skills growth.
• Promote a collaborative and innovative team culture.

• Strong experience in Azure and AWS cloud environments.
• Proven expertise with CI/CD tools (e.g., Azure DevOps, Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Leadership experience, both through delivery and developing technical teams.
• Expertise in monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).
• Proficiency in scripting and automation (Python, Bash, PowerShell).
• Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Solid understanding of networking, security, and cost optimisation in cloud environments.
• Knowledge of cybersecurity principles, secure coding practices, and compliance frameworks.

• A problem-solver with a proactive mindset.
• Comfortable working in fast-paced, evolving environments.
• Strong communicator who can bridge gaps between operations, development, and security teams.
• Passionate about automation, scalability, cost efficiency, and security.

Part of the Zellis Group, Moorepay is a team of over 500 friendly professionals across four offices in Swinton (Manchester), Sheffield, Birmingham and Kochi (India). We’re passionate about making Moorepay a fantastic place to work for every single one of our colleagues. The average length of service at Moorepay is 12 years, which speaks for itself!

To help make Moorepay such a great place to work, we focus on three things in our company culture: mental health support, maintaining a healthy work/life balance, and equal opportunities and inclusion for all.

Here’s what you’ll gain if you join our team:

• A career packed with opportunity, in a stable and growing company.
• A comprehensive programme of learning and development.
• Competitive base salary and annual bonus.
• 25 days annual leave, with the opportunity to buy more. You’ll even get your birthday off as well!
• Private medical insurance.
• Life assurance 4x salary.
• Enhanced pension with up to 8.5% employer contributions.
• A huge range of additional flexible benefits across financial & personal wellbeing, lifestyle & leisure.