Cloud Operations Lead

Job Summary

The Cloud Operations Lead is the senior technical and operational lead for an enterprise AWS cloud environment. The role covers cloud operations, governance, security, reliability, cost optimisation and continuous improvement. It works closely with cloud, infrastructure, security, architecture, application and management teams, and gives technical leadership to the Cloud Operations engineers who handle day-to-day support. This is a leadership, governance and L2/L3 escalation role, not a routine L1 BAU support position.

Responsibilities

• Lead the operational management and continuous improvement of the AWS cloud environment.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for cloud incidents, operational issues and complex service requests.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to Cloud Operations and support engineers.
• Own or coordinate cloud operational standards, including monitoring and alerting, incident and problem management, backup and restore, disaster recovery, patch and change management, security and compliance, and cloud resource lifecycle management.
• Review and approve cloud architecture and operational changes with EA/SA, Security and CCOE stakeholders.
• Coordinate AWS Security Hub remediation and cloud security improvements with Security/SecOps and application teams.
• Drive AWS cost optimisation and FinOps activities, including resource utilisation, rightsizing, tagging and cost governance.
• Support Landing Zone, IAM, network, logging and cloud governance requirements.
• Oversee Infrastructure-as-Code practices, particularly Terraform, to keep cloud configuration changes controlled.
• Coordinate cloud migration, onboarding, go-live and transition-to-operation activities.
• Lead or coordinate disaster recovery planning and DR drills, including readiness validation and stakeholder coordination.
• Work with application owners and vendors to assess cloud infrastructure changes and their impact on applications.
• Participate in CCOE governance, architecture, security and operational discussions.
• Manage operational risks, dependencies and escalations to senior management.
• Coordinate with AWS and other technology and service providers as required.

Requirements

• Around 7+ years of infrastructure or cloud experience, with strong AWS production experience.
• Several years as a Cloud Lead, Cloud Platform Lead, Senior Cloud Engineer or Cloud Operations Lead.
• Strong hands-on experience with core AWS services:
• Compute and containers: EC2, Lambda, EKS/ECR
• Networking: VPC, Transit Gateway, ALB/NLB
• Storage and databases: S3, RDS
• Identity and security: IAM, Secrets Manager
• Operations and monitoring: Systems Manager, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Security Hub, AWS Backup
• Solid experience with Terraform / Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with CI/CD and Git-based deployment processes.
• Strong background in monitoring and observability, incident/problem/change management, and backup, recovery and DR.
• Good working knowledge of cloud security and compliance.
• Experience in FinOps and AWS cost optimisation.
• Strong troubleshooting and decision-making ability.
• Able to communicate effectively with both engineers and senior stakeholders.
• Comfortable coordinating multiple application teams, security teams and external vendors.

Nice to Haves

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, or equivalent.
• Experience working within a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE) governance model.
• Experience leading cloud migration and transition-to-operations programmes.
• Experience running DR drills in large enterprise environments.