Cloud Architect

We are looking for a Cloud Architect to lead our Cloud Infrastructure team and own the reliability, scalability, security, and cost optimisation of our CDP platform across all client environments. You will be a hands-on technical leader who sets the architectural direction for cloud infrastructure while managing a small, high-impact team. This is a leadership hire; you will report directly to the VP of Engineering and be accountable for infrastructure that processes billions of customer events monthly for enterprise clients in regulated industries.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the cloud architecture strategy across AWS, GCP and Azure.
• Manage and mentor a team of 2 DevOps engineers, growing the team as needed.
• Design and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) for all environments: development, staging, production, and client-specific.
• Implement and manage CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI/CD serving all engineering teams.
• Own the monitoring and observability stack, alerting, dashboards, incident response, and SLAs.
• Manage Kubernetes and container orchestration across all environments.
• Drive cloud cost optimization target 20%+ annual reduction through RI planning, spot instances, right-sizing, and architectural improvements.
• Ensure security compliance, access management, encryption, and audit trails for regulated industries.
• Design and maintain multi-tenant infrastructure for client isolation.
• Own disaster recovery, backup strategies, and business continuity planning.
• Own and operate Kafka clusters: broker management, topic configuration, consumer group monitoring, performance tuning, and scaling.
• Manage MongoDB infrastructure replica sets, sharding, backup, performance optimisation, and capacity planning.
• Manage storage infrastructure across both clouds: object storage, block storage, database storage, lifecycle policies, and cost optimisation.
• Collaborate with data platform teams on analytical database infrastructure (Snowflake, BigQuery) and integration with streaming pipelines.
• Support client-facing engineers with environment provisioning, scaling, and performance troubleshooting.
• Provision compute resources for data science model training.

Requirements:

• 10+ years in cloud infrastructure / DevOps, with 3+ years in an architect or lead role.
• Deep expertise in AWS (EC2 EKS, RDS, S3 Lambda, CloudWatch, IAM, VPC) and GCP (GCE, GKE, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, IAM).
• Deep expertise in Kafka cluster deployment, broker tuning, partition management, consumer lag monitoring, scaling strategies, and production troubleshooting.
• Deep expertise in MongoDB replica set architecture, sharding, backup/restore, performance profiling, index optimisation, and capacity planning.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management, pod scheduling, resource limits, networking (Ingress, Service Mesh), RBAC, and troubleshooting production issues.
• Strong experience with storage architecture: object storage (S3 GCS), block storage (EBS, Persistent Disks), database storage optimisation, lifecycle management, and cross-cloud storage strategies.
• Strong experience with CI/CD using GitLab pipeline design, multi-environment deployments, artefact management, GitLab Runner management, and integration with Kubernetes Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred), multi-cloud provisioning, state management, modular design, and monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog, or ELK stack).
• Experience with cost optimisation at scale: RI planning, spot/preemptible instances, right-sizing, and architectural cost decisions across AWS and GCP.
• Security-first mindset; experience with compliance frameworks relevant to regulated industries.
• Experience managing and mentoring a team of 2-5 engineers.
• Strong communication skills; ability to work with data engineers, product engineers, and client-facing teams.