Cloud Operations Engineer

Cloud Operations Engineer (AWS or Azure) - Cheltenham

One of the UK’s largest financial services technology provider are seeking an experienced, hands-on Cloud Operations Engineer to join the team responsible for the availability, security, resilience, and performance of their AWS-hosted infrastructure.

This is a strictly hands-on, operational role focused on keeping their production environments stable, secure, and performant. You will operate as a core technical practitioner, balancing day-to-day BAU operations and infrastructure changes with continuous improvements to their resilience, automation, monitoring, and security posture.

About you:

• AWS Expertise: Proven hands-on experience managing AWS-hosted production environments, particularly compute (EC2, ECS), Application Load Balancers (ALB), and networking (VPCs, Security Groups, routing).
• Core Infrastructure Skills: Strong technical competency in Windows Server administration and foundational networking/load-balancing principles.
• SQL Server Experience: Operational support knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server (Note: This is not a DBA role, but requires comfort with basic triage and monitoring).
• Automation & CI/CD: Hands-on experience executing, supporting, and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation issues.
• Observability Tooling: Proficiency with monitoring systems like Datadog, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, or similar tools.

What will you be doing?

• Infrastructure Management: Operate and support their AWS production and non‑production environments, focusing heavily on compute services (EC2, ECS), VPC Networking, and storage.
• Incident Response & Triage: Act as the 1st and 2nd line of defense for platform/application issues. Participate in an out‑of‑hours on‑call rotation for P1/P2 incidents and scheduled deployments.
• Change & Release Support: Execute approved infrastructure changes following strict security controls. Support delivery teams with automated deployments and troubleshoot failed or degraded CI/CD releases.
• Database Support: Provide operational support for Microsoft SQL Server (health checks, job monitoring, basic triage, backup verification) and collaborate with DBA teams for deeper optimizations.
• Monitoring & Observability: Own and optimize monitoring tools (Datadog, CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray) to catch genuine service-impacting issues while reducing alert fatigue.
• Security & Compliance: Assess and remediate vulnerabilities, assist with compliance audits (ISO, regulatory assurance), and contribute to incident post-mortems.