Senior Cloud Engineer in Sheffield

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to join our platform team as a hands-on third line technical specialist. This is not a generalist role — we want someone who has been deep in the engine room: diagnosing production incidents under pressure, untangling networking edge cases that defeat everyone else, and building the infrastructure that teams depend on daily. You will be the technical escalation point for complex cloud infrastructure issues, owning problems from first triage through to root cause and lasting fix — not just restoring service and moving on. You'll also contribute to the platforms and automation that reduce the frequency of those escalations in the first place, turning hard-won experience into better systems. We are particularly keen to hear about the incidents and fixes you are proud of — the ones that required real diagnostic depth, creative thinking under pressure, or the courage to make a significant change in production.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Deployment: Deploy, implement, and manage secure, scalable, and resilient AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform through GitLab.
• Cloud Automation: Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines in GitLab to automate infrastructure delivery, testing, and compliance checks. Write supporting automation in Bash and Python using Terraform as the primary provisioning tool, reducing manual toil and enforcing consistent, repeatable deployments across all environments.
• Containerisation and Application Delivery: Manage containerised workloads running on Kubernetes, using Helm for packaging and ArgoCD to drive GitOps-based continuous delivery. Own the reliability of the deployment pipeline from image build through to production rollout, troubleshooting scheduling, networking, and configuration issues across the cluster.
• Cost Management: Monitor infrastructure costs, analyse usage patterns, and propose optimisations to reduce cloud spend and eliminate waste.
• Multi-Account Management: Oversee and maintain multiple AWS accounts, ensuring governance, compliance, and consistency across environments.
• Troubleshooting & Incident Response: Own third line escalations across compute, networking, storage, and Kubernetes layers — diagnosing root causes, not just restoring service. Produce post-incident reviews that convert hard-won fixes into permanent platform improvements and team knowledge.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Communicate infrastructure decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders, translating risk, complexity, and trade-offs into plain language. Produce documentation that is genuinely useful — runbooks, architecture notes, and post-incident summaries — not documentation for its own sake.
• Security & Compliance: Implement security best practices and ensure AWS environments adhere to organisational and regulatory requirements.
• Continuous Improvement: Actively track developments in AWS services, Terraform, and Kubernetes — evaluating new capabilities against real platform needs and proposing changes that deliver measurable improvement, not just novelty.
• On-Call & UK Shift Flexibility: Participate in the on-call ROTA and demonstrate flexibility to work in a UK shift environment occasionally, as needed.

Qualifications

What We’re Looking For

• Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure and services with a preference to AWS.
• Deep understanding of networking, security, and cloud architecture — able to design, critique, and debug at the architecture level, not just implement to a pattern.
• Proven experience with Terraform – capable of writing reusable modules and customising existing codebases.
• Strong understanding of Containerisation and delivery mechanisms including Docker, Kubernetes and Cloud PaaS Containerisation Solutions.
• Practical experience with EC2, S3, Route53, VPC, Lambda, CloudWatch, IAM, and other AWS services.
• Proven third line troubleshooting capability — able to diagnose complex, cross-layer issues spanning compute, networking, storage, and application tiers and drive them to root cause resolution.
• Knowledge of databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, AWS RDS or equivalent Cloud Database services.
• Able to communicate technical risk and complexity clearly to both engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders — in incidents, in documentation, and in architectural discussions.
• Customer-focused mindset with a passion for technology and continuous improvement.
• Self-motivated and collaborative — comfortable owning problems independently while keeping the wider team informed and involved.

What’s In It for You

• A collaborative team culture that values innovation, learning, and problem-solving.
• Opportunities to work on challenging projects across multiple AWS accounts.
• A chance to shape cloud deployment strategy in a fast-paced environment.
• Active support for continuous learning, training, and certification.

Additional Preferences

• AWS Certifications (Solutions Architect, System Administration, System-Operations, or DevOps) or equivalent is desirable but not mandatory.
• Experience in FinTech or other regulated environments (preferred but not essential).
• Passion for technology, automation, and operational excellence.
• A proactive approach with a positive attitude and adaptability to changing priorities.

Additional Information

• Hybrid role - Minimum 2 days/week work in the office.
• Salary range: £65,000 - £75,000 depending on the experience.

At our organization, we are committed to fighting against all forms of discrimination. We foster a work environment that is inclusive and respectful of all differences. All of our positions are open to people with disabilities. Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing equal opportunities and ensuring a fair and inclusive recruitment process. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or any other protected characteristic.