Head of Cloud Engineering | Head of Cloud & Container Platform Engineering

London | Hybrid

Up to £130 + 25% Bonus, 30 Days Holiday, 13% Pension, Full Family Health Care + Lots more

This is a senior platform engineering leadership role owning strategic cloud and container platforms across AWS, Azure and Kubernetes. The organisation is moving toward a more self-service, cloud-native developer platform model, so they need someone who can lead the engineering team, shape the roadmap, influence adoption and ensure the platform is secure, resilient, cost-effective and audit-ready.This role will suit someone who wants to own enterprise cloud platforms as a product, not just run cloud operations.

You must have experience and confidence in inherited fragmented cloud and container capability, created a standardised platform roadmap, introduced self-service patterns, embedded security and policy into the pipeline, improved reliability, reduced developer friction, and drove adoption across multiple engineering teams.”

The ideal candidate is a technically credible, product-minded cloud platform leader who has built or scaled enterprise platforms used by multiple engineering teams. Understand how to create safe self-service, how to lead senior engineers, how to influence application teams, and how to balance speed with resilience, security, audit and cost control.

Pragmatic, collaborative and clear in communication you must be able simplify complex technical topics for senior stakeholders while still being able to challenge engineers on design, delivery and operational quality.

• You have owned cloud platforms as products, not just delivered cloud projects.
• You understand developer experience and know how to make platforms easy to consume.
• You have embedded governance, security and compliance into engineering workflows rather than treating them as after-the-fact controls.
• You have worked in large-scale, regulated or high-control enterprise environments.
• You have strong cloud-native engineering judgement across Kubernetes, automation, GitOps, IaC and open-source tooling.
• You can challenge senior engineers technically while still leading with pragmatism, empathy and clarity.
• You are comfortable balancing speed, resilience, cost, security and adoption.

THE ROLE:

• Own cloud and container platforms as enterprise products, with internal engineering teams as the customer.
• Define and execute the platform roadmap across AWS, Azure and Kubernetes-based services.
• Lead the engineering, support and continuous improvement of core cloud hosting platforms.
• Drive modern platform engineering practices including self-service, automation, Infrastructure as Code, GitOps and continuous delivery.
• Build secure, automated, repeatable and cost-effective platform services.
• Improve developer journeys, service catalogues and platform adoption across multiple engineering teams.
• Embed security, risk, audit and governance controls into the platform by design.
• Enable safe, frequent production change with minimal disruption.
• Provide technical leadership on cloud migration, workload onboarding and platform design decisions.
• Lead, coach and motivate a senior engineering team.
• Act as a trusted advisor to engineering and product teams adopting cloud and container services.
• Support commercial and service-management relationships with major cloud providers.

THE REQUIREMENT:

• Strong background leading cloud platform, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE or infrastructure engineering teams.
• Technical credibility across AWS and/or Azure at enterprise platform level.
• Experience with Kubernetes-based container platforms such as EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift or equivalent.
• Proven experience building or scaling internal developer platforms, self-service cloud services or platform-as-a-product capabilities.
• Strong understanding of Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform or equivalent.
• Experience with GitOps and deployment tooling such as ArgoCD, Flux or similar.
• Good understanding of CI/CD, automated testing, continuous delivery and safe production change.
• Strong appreciation of security, risk, audit, resilience and regulatory requirements in cloud environments.
• Experience leading technical teams through incidents, service improvements and complex platform change.
• Ability to influence senior engineers, application teams and non-technical stakeholders.
• Clear communication style, with the ability to simplify complex technical topics for senior stakeholders