Senior Cloud Platform Engineer

We're looking for a senior, hands-on Cloud Platform Engineer to help design, standardise, and operate cloud platforms that underpin multiple AI-driven products and services. This role is about building well-defined, reusable platform patterns that enable delivery teams to move quickly while maintaining high standards of reliability, security, and cost control. You'll play a key role in shaping how AI and cloud services are built, deployed, and operated across several concurrent initiatives, reducing fragmentation and improving consistency across the platform estate. This is a hands-on technical role for someone who enjoys making strong architectural decisions, establishing clear standards, and balancing flexibility with standardisation in a fast-moving environment., * Design and implement well-defined architecture patterns for cloud-native and AI-enabled services on AWS

• Create and maintain reusable blueprints for common service types and workloads

• Drive consistency across multiple projects through shared modules, templates, and platform tooling

• Define standards for service deployment, integration, communication, and day-to-day operations

• Build and maintain Terraform-based infrastructure, with a strong emphasis on modular, reusable design

• Define CI/CD patterns for:

• Infrastructure provisioning and change management
• Application and model deployment

• Enforce best practices through pipelines and automation, rather than documentation alone

• Embed SRE principles across all services, including:

• Monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing
• SLIs, SLOs, and actionable alerting

• Continuously improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
• Operate and evolve API gateway and data plane technologies (e.g. Kong)

• Strong experience operating AWS-based platforms in production
• Proven expertise with Terraform, including module design and CI/CD integration
• Hands-on experience with container platforms:

• ECS preferred; EKS acceptable if adaptable

• Experience operating API gateways (Kong or equivalent)

• Solid understanding of cloud networking, service discovery, and communication patterns

• Experience supporting multiple teams or projects on a shared platform

• Strong troubleshooting skills and real-world production operations experience

• Practical experience running or supporting AI/ML workloads in production, such as:

• Model inference services
• Batch or streaming processing pipelines
• Integrations with LLM APIs or managed model services

• Strong understanding of:

• Scaling characteristics of AI workloads
• Cost drivers for compute-heavy and GPU-based workloads

• Familiarity with:

• Model serving frameworks
• Data processing pipelines
• AWS managed AI / ML services

• GPU workloads or specialised compute environments
• Feature stores, vector databases, or embedding pipelines
• Event-driven architectures
• Cloud security best practices (IAM, secrets management, Zero Trust)
• Platform engineering or internal developer platform experience, * An open and genuine communicator
• Able to take responsibility for your actions
• Always learning and wanting to improve
• Takes responsibility for own development
• Love what you do
• Value and support your team
• Embrace who you are
• Open minded and willing to explore new ideas

We value our team and to attract exceptional people, we offer an excellent package! In 2023, 2024 and 2025 we were recognised as one of the Best Workplaces in Tech by Great Place To Work UK, the global authority on workplace culture. As a Leighton employee you can look forward to:

• A competitive salary this will be dependent on experience.
• A contributory pension scheme
• Private healthcare
• 25 days annual leave, plus bank holidays and the opportunity to buy or sell holiday
• A flexible approach to working hours
• Continuous personal development, career path and training
• And more....

About Leighton

Leighton: 33 years and counting. Experienced and agile. Trusted by some of the world's biggest brands. We develop and deliver custom software. We use technology to make money, save money, create efficiencies, integrate systems, solve problems. To help our customers thrive. We have a pool of talent. To manage projects. Test to high standards. Create user experiences for every type of user. We include, include, include. Our service is personal. We know your name. We can do amazing things with tech. We've got the talent. We decide what's best for our customer together. Our Values The Leighton culture defines how we do business and how we interact with our colleagues and customers. It makes us unique and provides us with a competitive advantage

• We act with honesty and truth, always!
• We collaborate to bring our purpose to life in a caring and supportive way
• We nurture our amazing people to be the best version of themselves
• Passionate about what we do, proud of what we achieve
• Our curiosity inspires the amazing