Cloud Engineer, Senior Specialist

Team & Opportunity  

The Cloud Engineer, Senior Specialist is responsible for the operational excellence, reliability, security, and continuous improvement of enterprise cloud platforms. The role serves as a senior technical escalation point for cloud-related incidents, platform events, automation initiatives, and engineering activities across AWS-hosted services.

Working closely with application teams, platform engineering teams, security, resiliency, and infrastructure operations, the Senior Cloud Engineer drives operational stability through automation, observability, governance, and cloud best practices. The role combines deep technical expertise with operational leadership to ensure cloud services remain secure, resilient, and highly available

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Platform Operations

• Provide senior-level operational support for cloud platforms and services running in AWS.
• Act as an escalation point for complex infrastructure, platform, networking, security, and deployment issues.
• Manage platform-impacting events, maintenance activities, and service restorations.
• Ensure cloud services meet established availability, performance, and operational standards.

Incident Management & Problem Resolution

• Lead technical triage and resolution activities during major incidents.
• Perform deep-dive troubleshooting across cloud infrastructure, networking, application integrations, and deployment pipelines.
• Drive root cause analysis and implementation of preventative actions.
• Partner with engineering teams to eliminate recurring operational issues and improve service resiliency.

Automation & Engineering

• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code solutions using CloudFormation, Terraform, and automation tooling.
• Improve operational efficiency through scripting, workflow automation, and self-service capabilities.
• Support CI/CD tooling (GitHub), deployment pipelines, and platform automation frameworks.
• Identify opportunities to reduce manual effort and operational risk through engineering solutions.

Observability & Platform Reliability

• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability capabilities using tools such as Splunk, CloudWatch, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, and related platforms.
• Improve monitoring coverage, alert quality, and operational dashboards.
• Analyse trends and recommend platform improvements to enhance system stability and performance.
• Support operational readiness, resiliency testing, and recovery exercises.

Governance, Risk & Security

• Ensure operational activities comply with enterprise security, risk, and change management standards.
• Support privileged access controls, cloud account governance, and infrastructure compliance requirements.
• Participate in audit responses, operational reviews, and security remediation activities.
• Maintain platform documentation, standards, runbooks, and knowledge articles.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Partner with engineering teams to define and promote cloud operational best practices.
• Mentor junior engineers and provide technical guidance across CloudOps and Infrastructure Operations teams.
• Contribute to skills development, knowledge sharing, and operational maturity initiatives.
• Support global operational coverage and participate in on-call and major incident rotations.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of infrastructure, cloud engineering, or platform operations experience.
• Advanced experience supporting AWS production platforms and services.
• Strong knowledge of:
  • EC2, ECS / Fargate, IAM, VPC Networking, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, S3, Lambda, API Gateway, Route 53
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps tooling.
• Strong troubleshooting and incident management skills.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical investigations and resolve complex issues under pressure.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Professional-level certification.
• Experience with Terraform, Python, Bash, or similar automation technologies.
• Experience with observability platforms including Splunk, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, and AppDynamics.
• Exposure to multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Experience driving operational excellence, reliability improvements, and platform transformations.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.