Lead Cloud Engineer

We're supporting a major UK critical-infrastructure organisation on a significant cloud platform evolution, delivered through a leading global IT services partner. This programme sits at the heart of a long-term digital transformation focused on modern engineering, platform reliability, and secure cloud adoption at scale. They're looking for a Lead Cloud Engineer to provide technical leadership to a Cloud DevOps function responsible for enabling change across a large, enterprise Azure estate. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll shape engineering direction, influence stakeholders, and ensure the cloud platform remains secure, current, and built on best practice foundations. The Role: You'll lead a Cloud DevOps team that underpins a complex Azure platform used across multiple business areas. The focus is on enabling teams to modernise application portfolios, adopt DevOps practices, and deliver securely at pace. You'll act as the bridge between engineering, architecture, and business stakeholders - managing priorities, shaping the backlog with Product Owners, and ensuring delivery aligns to a defined architectural runway and roadmap. Agile ways of working are central to this environment, and you'll play a key role in embedding modern engineering practices across the organisation.

What You'll Be Doing

• Providing technical leadership across the Azure cloud platform and DevOps practices
• Acting as a trusted advisor to stakeholders throughout the cloud lifecycle
• Partnering with Product Owners to manage demand planning and optimise backlog delivery
• Coaching and developing engineers while evangelising modern engineering standards
• Driving continuous improvement across engineering, delivery, and operational practices
• Ensuring platform currency, reliability, availability, and security
• Working closely with Architecture functions to align platform design with standards and best practice
• Supporting teams to adopt secure software lifecycle and DevOps patterns
• Playing a key role in protecting the organisation from cyber risk through adherence to standards, * Influence the direction of a large-scale Azure platform used across a nationally significant organisation
• Blend hands-on cloud engineering with leadership and stakeholder influence
• Work in a genuinely Agile, engineering-led environment
• Fully remote contract with long-term programme visibility
• Opportunity to shape DevOps maturity at enterprise scale

What They're Looking For: This is a role for someone comfortable operating in complex, matrixed enterprise environments with strong Azure depth and real DevOps leadership experience. Essential experience

• Strong background in Cloud / DevOps Engineering leadership
• Deep, hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure
• Proven experience working in Agile environments
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or ARM)
• Experience across the DevOps toolchain (e.g. GitHub, Jenkins, Argo)
• Exposure to configuration management (Ansible, Puppet, Chef)
• Scripting experience (Python, Go or similar)
• Containerisation and orchestration experience (Kubernetes, Docker, Podman)
• Solid OS fundamentals - performance, diagnostics, monitoring (CPU, memory, network, IO)
• Experience working with multiple stakeholder groups and managing technical priorities
• Ability to operate effectively within a matrix organisation

Desirable

• Experience in highly regulated or critical national infrastructure environments
• Strong commercial awareness and ability to align engineering with business value