Azure Cloud Platform Lead & Tech Team Leader

About us

Vida Bank provides competitive savings products through Vida Savings and specialist mortgage solutions through Vida Homeloans. Our mortgage business supports Buy to Let (BTL) and residential borrowers (ROO) who find themselves underserved elsewhere. Our mortgage customers range from Buy to Let investors to the self-employed and customers with multiple jobs. Our savings proposition is delivered online via our website and is focused on providing savers with fair, transparent and competitive rates. Our typical customers are active savers, who tend to look beyond their current account provider for savings accounts. Our business model and strategy are underpinned by our core purpose to ‘Help More People Find a Place to call Home’. We are here to help the under-served, especially those with more nuanced personal circumstances or borrowing needs who are not able to access a mortgage from a mainstream mortgage lender. Working exclusively with intermediary partners, we combine cutting-edge technology with skilled and caring underwriting expertise to solve complex customer problems.

As a fully regulated UK based bank with ambitious growth aspirations, we recognise the importance of having a clearly articulated culture strategy and the need to actively manage how it embeds in the business together with the behaviours which exemplify it. As a recognised Best Companies Top 100 mid-sized company to work for in the UK and a finalist at the Financial Reporter Women’s Recognition Awards, we take pride in our diverse workforce, championing both ethic and gender diversity through our EDI commitments. Having met the target set by being a member of the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter we have 50% of senior management roles filled by women. With offices in London, Newcastle and Skipton, we bring our teams together regularly to collaborate and empower our colleagues to have more choice around when and where they work on the days they are not in the office, with colleagues working remotely in various locations across the UK.

Our Culture

We are proud to have built a culture founded on an ethos of caring, and that sits at the heart of our Vida Values, driving the way we run our business, support our customers and other stakeholders on a daily basis. We genuinely care about delivering the right outcomes for all our stakeholders who we consider through the cultural framework as our customers, colleagues, company and communities that we operate in. By Joining Vida you will have a sense of belonging in what is a diverse and collaborative environment, where you will be empowered to take responsibility for driving delivery. We embrace a diversity of backgrounds and experiences in our people, in the deeply held belief that better outcomes are achieved for customers when our colleagues are better placed to empathise with and understand their unique circumstances. From application to interview, we place inclusion at the heart of all we do.

Role Overview:

The Cloud Platform lead is a newly created role within Vida Banks technology team, introduced to support and provide strategic oversight for the growth and increasing complexity and reliance on the organisations cloud infrastructure footprint. This hands-on engineering role builds, operates, and improves secure and resilient cloud platform services. It collaborates with the Head of Technology Operations, internal teams, and third-party partners to ensure consistent implementation, effective operation, and ongoing enhancement of Azure services aligned to business requirements and growth. A strong opportunity to combine technical ownership with strategic impact in a collaborative, forward-thinking environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build, operate, and continuously improve resilient, dependable, and appropriately secured Azure platform services in line with Vida’s policies, compliance, and security requirements.
• Take a hands-on technical role in the deployment, configuration, and ongoing management of Azure infrastructure, including AKS, Terraform, Serverless Compute services, PaaS, IaaS services.
• Lead a technical team of two members, providing strategic direction, mentorship, and ongoing support.
• Develop reusable patterns, configurations, and modules for consistent platform use.
• Enable product teams to be increasingly self-sufficient through great documentation, collaboration, and thoughtful use of automation and AI.
• Set and enforce engineering standards across cloud, automation, and configuration management.
• Observability and operations: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, performance telemetry, and SLAs/SLOs for pipelines.
• Produce and maintain clear, accurate documentation covering platform setup, configurations, operational procedures, and support processes, ensuring audit readiness.
• Provide metrics and reporting of services to the Head of Technology Operations.
• Lead cost optimisations (FinOps) and platform performance.
• Work collaboratively and where required provide direction to other members of the technology team in support of day-to-day operations and the delivery of key strategic projects.
• Influence tooling, ways of working and adoption of modern technologies across teams.

Requirements:

• 6+ Years experience designing and operating cloud platforms (Azure essential).
• Strong background in Infrastructure operations.
• Proven expertise with Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) & Kubernetes (AKS) design and deployment.
• Proven experience deploying and operating: Compute Services, Function Apps, Logic Apps, Storage Services, Network Services, Azure Data Factory Services & Data Bricks.
• Deep understanding of cloud security, networking, DevOps & ICD Pipelines.
• Confident communicator to be able to influence team members, architects, and stakeholders.
• CNCF certifications.
• Experience in regulated environments (FS preferred).

Our Values

Our values are well established and recognised throughout our organisation. They provide a frame of reference for the behaviours expected from our colleagues every day. We find ways to break old conventions, especially those which cause exclusion or customer harm. We look for these qualities when hiring new talent into the organisation, and they underpin our approach to personal development and performance management for all our people. At the heart of this is the fact we care about our Customers, Our Colleagues and our Communities. We are:

• Visionary - We innovate and break old habits, thinking big and pushing boundaries together as one team.
• Inclusive - We value each other’s differences and work to see people for who they really are.
• Dynamic - We are flexible and fast, cutting through complexity and never accepting second best.
• Authentic - We are honest and genuine, what you see is what you get.

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive benefits package to support our employees’ professional and personal needs. Further details can be provided upon application.