Cloud Operations Manager - AWS/Azure
First seen by Alion on Oct 31, 2026.
Role : Cloud Operations Manager
10+ years total - approx. 5 years technical + 5+ years people and vendor management
Lead day-to-day cloud operations across the service estate, providing clear operational ownership for availability, resilience, security, performance, cost and delivery. The role combines technical knowledge, people management and vendor management. The manager will oversee a small internal team and coordinate with the outsourced operations team of approximately 25 members through the vendor's leadership. The role integrates internal engineers and outsourced teams into one operating model and turns standards set by architecture, security and governance into repeatable operational practice.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES / RESPONSIBILITIES :
- Lead 24x7 cloud operations across AWS and relevant Azure services, ensuring clear ownership, effective on-call coverage and disciplined operational handovers.
- Own operational performance for incident, problem, change, request, event, capacity, availability, backup, patching, vulnerability remediation and disaster-recovery readiness.
- Manage and develop a small internal team of cloud engineers; set objectives, conduct reviews, allocate work and build a culture of accountability and blameless learning.
- Direct the outsourced provider's L1/L2 cloud operations and DevOps services (approximately 25 staff), working through the vendor's leadership and coordinating with the Service Manager to manage performance, priorities, escalations and improvement commitments.
- Maintain service health dashboards, operational scorecards, risk registers, runbooks, support models, asset/configuration data and technical debt backlogs.
- Act as operational incident commander or escalation lead for major incidents; ensure timely stakeholder communication, technical coordination and corrective-action follow-through.
- Partner with Architecture, Security and Engineering to embed guardrails for identity, networking, backup, observability, tagging, infrastructure as code, endpoint protection and policy compliance.
- Drive cloud cost optimisation and capacity management, validating savings, preventing waste and balancing cost decisions against resilience, security and customer commitments.
- Plan and evidence operational resilience through recovery testing, failure-mode analysis and remediation of single points of failure.
- Provide operational acceptance for new and changed services, ensuring supportability, monitoring, documentation, ownership and recovery requirements are met before production use.
MUST-HAVE SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE :
- 10+ years of total experience, with approximately 5 years in a hands-on technical role (cloud engineering, infrastructure, DevOps or platform operations) followed by 5 or more years in people management and/or vendor management.
- Strong experience leading cloud, infrastructure or production-operations teams in a business-critical environment.
- Hands-on understanding of AWS operations (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, CloudWatch, IAM, VPC, Transit Gateway, AWS Config, Systems Manager); relevant Azure experience is desirable.
- Evidence of managing major incidents, operational risk, change, resilience, observability and service improvement at scale.
- Experience directing managed service providers and multidisciplinary teams across locations and time zones.
- Working knowledge of ITSM frameworks and service management tools (e.g. ServiceNow, Jira Service Management).
- Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, monitoring and observability platforms (e.g. Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor).
- Understanding of cloud security controls, patching, backup, disaster recovery and compliance requirements.
TECHNOLOGY STACK :
- Cloud Platforms : AWS (primary), Azure (secondary).
- Infrastructure as Code : Terraform.
- CI/CD : GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Azure DevOps.
- Configuration Management : Ansible.
- Monitoring and Observability : Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor.
- ITSM : ServiceNow, Jira Service Management.
- Security and Compliance : AWS Config, GuardDuty, Security Hub, Azure Policy, Defender for Cloud.
- Scripting : Python, PowerShell, Bash.
COMPETENCIES :
- Operational leadership : Decisive and composed operational leadership, particularly during high-severity incidents.
- Analytical decision-making : Ability to interpret technical, service and financial data and turn it into prioritised action.
- People leadership Strong people leadership, coaching, workload management and cross-team influence.
- Vendor management : Experience managing vendor relationships, holding providers accountable to SLAs and driving improvement.
- Pragmatic risk management : Pragmatic risk judgement : able to improve control without unnecessarily slowing delivery.
- Communication : Clear communication with engineers, suppliers, customers and senior leaders.
Skills
Cloud Operations, AWS, Azure, IAC Terraform, ITSM, CI/CD, Configuration Management, Monitoring Tools, Observability Services, Python, Cloud Infrastructure