Cloud Platform Engineer

Defaqto
London, UK
5 days ago
Apply on www.collegerecruiter.com
Prepare application

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Working hours
Regular working hours

Tech stack

Artificial Intelligence Amazon Web Services Audit Trail Microsoft Azure Big Data BigQuery Cloud Computing Databases Continuous Integration Information Engineering Data Stores DevOps
+21 more
Programming Tools Identity and Access Management Data Intelligence Python (Programming Language) Key Management Performance Tuning Reliability Engineering Site Reliability Engineering Practices Cloud Services Ansible Zero Trust Network Access Pulumi Google Cloud Cloud Platform System Large Language Models Multi-Cloud HybridCloud Kubernetes Terraform Data Pipelines Docker

Job description

Design the Platform Behind Every Product, Data Insight and AI InnovationAs a sole contributor, you’ll Lead the design and operation of a modern multi-cloud platform that underpins engineering, data and product teams across the business., * Create self-service platforms, golden paths and developer tools that enable teams to ship quickly without managing cloud complexity.

  • Build AI-ready infrastructure, guardrails and automation that support both human engineers and autonomous AI agents.
  • Champion a zero-trust, secure-by-default approach across identities, networks, workloads and data
  • Partner with data teams to optimise cloud data platforms, pipelines and analytics environments that power business-critical insights.

What you’ll do

  • Design, build and operate our multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud platform across at least two of the top-three providers (AWS, Azure and/or Google Cloud), plus on-prem/hybrid connectivity where needed.
  • Build and own an internal developer platform and self-service “golden paths” that make cloud infrastructure feel invisible and commoditised for engineering, data and product teams; and their AI agents.
  • Deliver everything as code: infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, reusable modules, CI/CD pipelines and policy-as-code guardrails.
  • Leverage AI agents extensively to automate and optimise platform work - provisioning, cost and performance optimisation, incident response, remediation and documentation.
  • Prepare the infrastructure for AI agents as first-class “engineers”: safe machine identities, scoped permissions, sandboxes, approval workflows and audit trails so agents can provision and operate infrastructure within tight guardrails.
  • Embed a zero-trust security model across identity, network, workloads and data for both human and machine/agent identities; secure by default, least privilege, secrets management and continuous compliance.
  • Apply SRE practices - SLOs/SLIs, observability, capacity planning, resilience and blameless incident management - to keep the platform reliable and cost-efficient.
  • Partner with data engineering to design and optimise data pipelines, data stores and large-scale analytics infrastructure such as BigQuery, including query, cost and performance tuning.
  • Mentor engineers, set technical direction and champion strong platform and security engineering standards across the organisation.

Requirements

  • Extensive hands-on experience designing, building and operating production cloud infrastructure at senior or lead level.
  • Multi-cloud experience across at least two of the top three providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud), including a recognised professional-level cloud certification for each of those two providers (for example AWS Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer Professional, Azure Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer Expert, or Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect / DevOps Engineer).
  • Strong background in modern hybrid-cloud architecture and connecting cloud with on-prem/edge environments.
  • Deep infrastructure-as-code and automation skills (e.g. Terraform/OpenTofu, Pulumi, Ansible), GitOps and CI/CD, plus containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
  • Proven experience building internal developer platforms, self-service golden paths and platform-as-a-product to abstract away cloud complexity for engineering teams.
  • Practical experience using AI agents / LLM-based tooling to automate and optimise infrastructure work, and interest in designing infrastructure that AI agents can operate safely.
  • Strong security engineering mindset with hands-on zero-trust experience across identity, network, workloads and data - including secrets management, least-privilege IAM and machine/workload identity.
  • Solid programming/scripting ability (e.g. Python, Go) and strong observability, reliability and cost-optimisation practices., * Experience working as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with SLOs/SLIs, error budgets and incident management.
  • A third top-tier cloud certification, or specialist security/Kubernetes certifications (e.g. CKA/CKS).
  • Significant data engineering experience: designing and operating data pipelines and data stores, and optimising databases and large-scale data infrastructure such as BigQuery (including query, cost and performance tuning).
  • Experience preparing environments for autonomous/agentic workloads - sandboxes, scoped machine identities, approval workflows and audit trails.
  • Experience in a regulated or fintech environment.

Your approach to work

  • Pragmatic and hands-on, with a strong bias for automation and eliminating toil.
  • Product mindset - you treat internal engineers (human and AI) as your customers and obsess over their experience.
  • Security-and reliability-first, collaborative, and comfortable leading and mentoring., Applicants must already hold a legal right to work in the UK without time restrictions and without the need for future sponsorship. We are unable to provide Skilled Worker visa sponsorship.

Apply for this position

This job is hosted externally. Click below to view the full posting and apply.

Apply on www.collegerecruiter.com
Prepare application

Good distractions

Talks and stories from around this role — technically off-topic, practically not.

1:34 min

Pivoting careers into specialized platform engineering roles

Xavier Portilla Edo ¡ LIVE

2:17 min

Mapping the maturity roadmap for scaled devops adoption

Dominik Krichbaum Dominik Krichbaum ¡ World Congress 2026 Europe

1:55 min

Contrasting Terraform with Pulumi and cloud-specific tools

Devlin Duldulao ¡ LIVE

2:07 min

Inspecting default bridge architectures and custom Docker networks

Oliver Seitz Oliver Seitz ¡ World Congress 2025

3:03 min

Career evolution in data engineering and AI platforms

Maria Apazoglou ¡ Coffee With Developers

3:18 min

Scaling global network engineering through DevOps culture

Stuart Clark ¡ LIVE

Videos

See all

Related articles

See all