Cloud & Platform Engineering Lead

Moorepay is transforming. We are a trusted leader in UK Payroll and HR solutions, but we aren't resting on our history. We are embarking on a major digital transformation to redefine how businesses manage their most important asset: their people.

The Cloud & Platform Engineering Lead will ensure the reliability, scalability, and security of our engineering systems. Working closely with the Engineering Manager and Head of Engineering, the Platform Lead will identify priorities to remove friction from engineering teams, streamline processes, and enhance operational excellence. This role combines software engineering principles with systems administration to deliver robust, automated, cost-effective, and secure-by-design solutions.

The Cloud & Platform Engineering Lead plays a critical role in ensuring that our AI-driven, cloud-native platform is reliable, observable, secure, and able to scale with the organisation’s growth. As we adopt intelligent agents, autonomous workflows, and increasingly complex distributed systems, the Platform Lead ensures that resilience, performance, and operational excellence are built into everything we deliver. By partnering closely with Engineers, Architects, and the Engineering Manager, the SRE defines the patterns, tooling, and automation that enable fast, safe, and repeatable deployments.

This role safeguards our production environment, drives continuous improvement across CI/CD and observability, and establishes reliability practices that empower autonomous squads to move quickly without compromising stability. The Platform Lead is essential to maintaining customer trust, supporting AI-first innovation, and ensuring our platform remains robust, secure, and highly available on a scale.

This is a full time, permanent role working on a hybrid basis with 3 days per week in Manchester.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical & Architectural Leadership

• Define and deliver cloud and platform architectures aligned with enterprise patterns and security frameworks.
• Produce Low-Level Designs and ensure alignment with High-Level Designs.
• Drive adoption of automation, Infrastructure as Code and reusable solution patterns.
• Provide expert guidance on cloud-native architectures, containerisation and modern engineering practices.

Platform Engineering & Delivery Enablement

• Build, maintain and optimise CI/CD pipelines.
• Enhance observability through logging, alerting and monitoring.
• Ensure platform services scale with evolving business demands.
• Support operational readiness across all environments.

Cost Optimisation

• Lead cost-efficient design, provisioning and operation of cloud and platform services.
• Implement tagging standards, usage reporting, budget alerts and governance controls.
• Identify and eliminate underutilised or unnecessary spend.
• Drive adoption of autoscaling, rightsizing, reserved instances and savings plans.
• Collaborate with Finance on forecasting and cost reviews.

Cloud Capability Leadership

• Define and evolve the Cloud Delivery Roadmap.
• Maintain a Cloud Service Catalogue aligned to KPIs and SLAs.
• Embed continuous improvement across cloud and platform services.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Collaborate with Architecture, Group Technology, Service Management, Product and Portfolio teams.
• Communicate technical plans, risks and performance updates.
• Manage third-party cloud partners.

People Leadership

• Lead, coach and develop a high-performing engineering team.
• Support career development and skills growth.
• Promote a collaborative and innovative team culture.

Skills & Experience

• Proven experience in Cloud, Platform or DevOps engineering roles.
• Strong experience in Azure and AWS cloud environments.
• Proven expertise with CI/CD tools (e.g., Azure DevOps, Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Leadership experience, both through delivery and developing technical teams.
• Expertise in monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).
• Proficiency in scripting and automation (Python, Bash, PowerShell).
• Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Solid understanding of networking, security, and cost optimisation in cloud environments.
• Knowledge of cybersecurity principles, secure coding practices, and compliance frameworks.