Lead Cloud Platform Engineer

at  The Cumberland

THE VACANCY

Working at the Cumberland, you become part of something special. We’re a Mutual organisation, committed to improving the lives of our colleagues, customers, and community. Our values are incredibly important to us.
We’re on an exciting transformational journey with our people firmly at the forefront of our plans. If you want to work for a team integral in helping to drive cultural change, a team where you can bring your whole self to work bringing your energy and creativity to make a positive difference, then this is the job for you.
We have an exciting opportunity for a Lead Cloud Platform Engineer to join our Technology team.
As our Lead Cloud Platform Engineer, you’ll lead and be accountable for the health of the Cloud platform engineering discipline. As an expert in your field, you’ll support the technology strategy for your discipline, promoting and championing it across the Cumberland.
You’ll have the respect and trust of your practice community. This is a hands-on role, and you’ll lead by example, communicating and demonstrating the benefits of good and best practice. There is also considerable thought-leadership and communication required in the role and you’ll create space within the discipline for new ideas.
You’ll take line-management responsibility for all Platform Engineers including professional development, holiday/sickness tracking and performance management (objectives, appraisals).
You should also grow the profile of the discipline internally and externally.

ABOUT YOU

We’re looking for expertise and significant experience of:

• Working with Azure cloud-based infrastructure
• Championing the preference to work with “Infrastructure as Code” – terraform/BICEP.
• Full cloud networking; TCP/IP, DNS, Routing, HTTP/S, Peering, Vnets, NSG’s, VPN’s, load balancers, and boundary security appliances.
• Cloud infrastructure security best practices.
• Azure-AD (Entra-ID), Landing Zones, Azure Policy, service principles, management groups and subscriptions.
• Working with monitoring & alerting tools & technologies.
• “Infrastructure as Code” templating tooling (e.g. Puppet, Chef, Ansible).
• CI/CD tooling & practices (e.g. Github, ADO, Jenkins, TeamCity, automation techniques).
• Scripting languages/tools like Bash, Ruby, Python.
• Agile/devops practices and terminology.
• Microsoft well-architected framework and Microsoft best practices.

We’d also like to see line management experience, that you are comfortable working in agile and waterfall delivery-type teams and are familiar with Confluence & Jira as well as experience in a financial services or other highly regulated environment.

Key skills, abilities, and behaviours we’d like to see include:

• Leadership: Able to articulate and communicate a sense of direction and commitment to people.
• Building relationships: Continually uses the combined and cooperative efforts of others. Develops credibility with all stakeholders and influences through democracy.
• Operational Excellence: Understand how strong operational delivery supports the vision and strategic plan and can lead large and complex programmes to delivery.
• Strategic Vision: Able to step back from day‐to‐day activities to view the business from a different perspective; to see the bigger picture, distil information, trends, and needs, to build credible strategies to achieve the desired vision and commercial outcomes.
• Commercial/Member Focus: Balances business acumen with a passion for the member; focuses on maximising competitive position and member loyalty, without compromising financial stability.
• Achievement Driven: Displays desire and drive for success, projecting enthusiasm and having impact on others, models drive and resilience and leads by example.
• Risk Aware: Possesses a deep understanding of the regulatory environment.
• Mutual Ethos: Espouse mutual ethos and have an affinity with, and a commitment to the membership model.

• Co-accountable for defining cloud infrastructure strategy & roadmap for high-volume, high-performance, high-availability applications and platforms.
• Stability, performance, maintenance, and ongoing improvement of the CBS Cloud Platform.
• The development and maintenance of the CBS cloud platform technology roadmap.
• Development & maintenance of best practice, standards, policy, and frameworks/governance
• Ensure that the society has the correct capacity of platform engineering to meet demand via upskilling, continual development, recruitment and utilizing contingent resources (relationship mgmt. required).
• Developing code and configuring infrastructure/platforms as the situation arises (emergencies, pairing, training & development)
• Responsible (in conjunction with Cloud Platform Manager & Cloud Architecture) for CBS cloud infrastructure technologies strategy.
• Accountable for low-level cloud platform & cloud infrastructure designs.
• Accountable for solution option / KDD documentation for cloud engineering
• Accountable for cloud engineering solution/technical design documentation
• Leads the development and improvement of CCoE standards and patterns for cloud engineering.
• Supports Design governance (DA) engagement for cloud engineering matters & CBS Cloud platform.
• Support new and existing Cloud Platform Engineers & infrastructure colleagues with the ongoing transition to agile ways of working, agile delivery teams, and the cloud migration journey by ensuring they have the right skills and training.
• Building and maintaining pipelines that promote safe and repeatable deployments.
• Ensuring Cloud Infrastructure is operating within appropriate cost parameters and that monitoring and altering is in-place to highlight exceptions and outside of tolerance usage.
• May be required to provide 24/7 on call technical support (as part of a sensible rota).
• To understand and be aware of the risk and control environment in your area of the business and adhere to processes, procedures and policies in order to minimise risks.