Cloud Platform Engineer

Cloud Platform Engineer

Department: Technology

Employment Type: Permanent – Full Time

Location: London

Reporting To: jsmith@defaqto.com

Description

Design the Platform Behind Every Product, Data Insight and AI Innovation

As 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.

You will:

• 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.

What you’ll need to succeed:

Essential 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.

Desirable requirements:

• 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.

Important to know:

Location:

We have multiple offices across the UK. We have a new office in London which is becoming more central to where collaborate in person. We have a flexible working policy with a few days per week in the office.

Right to Work:

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.

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