Important High Level Summary Notes
Please read the overview below carefully. This is a standout technical ownership role and will appeal to engineers who want real influence, autonomy, and accountability.
If this position is of interest, please contact me directly for a confidential conversation ASAP:
Lorenz Pasch at Hays Recruitment: Mobile and email address are available on my LinkedIn profile.
This is not a traditional cloud engineering role and not a position hidden behind layers of process, platforms, or support teams
This is a senior cloud platform ownership role in a security-critical trading environment, offering genuine end-to-end responsibility, technical authority, and long-term platform influence.
The successful candidate will act as the owner of the Azure and Kubernetes platform in production and will be trusted to design, secure, and evolve the environment with minimal constraint.
You must be able to demonstrate:
- Genuine end-to-end ownership of a production cloud platform, not just contribution within a larger team
- Strong hands-on experience across both Microsoft Azure and Kubernetes (AKS), with confidence operating each in depth
- Making architectural and security decisions that materially affect the business
- Direct ownership of incidents, outages, and recovery, with the ability to clearly articulate failure modes and improvements
- Comfort being the final technical escalation point, rather than relying on central platform, SRE, or security teams
If your experience has been limited to tightly controlled environments, Azure-only roles, or Kubernetes without real platform accountability, this role will not be a good fit.
Cloud Engineer - Azure & Kubernetes (Platform Ownership)
Location: London/Hybrid (Three days in London)
Type: Permanent
Priority: Immediate, business-critical hire
We are building a high-performance trading platform where stability, correctness, and security genuinely matter. We are now hiring a senior Cloud Engineer to own the cloud platform that underpins the business.
This role offers something increasingly rare:real ownership, real trust, and meaningful technical impact.
You will not be maintaining someone else's design or operating within rigid guardrails. You will design and run the Azure and Kubernetes platform that production systems depend on, with the authority to shape how it is built and operated long-term.
Corporate IT and end user support are fully outsourced. There is no internal platform or SRE team taking responsibility away from you. The platform is yours to own.
The role
You will own the Azure cloud platform across development, UAT, and production environments, supporting a live, security sensitive trading system running on Kubernetes (AKS).You will design and evolve cloud architecture spanning networking, isolation, identity, access, and private connectivity, using Terraform as the source of truth.
You will operate and mature Kubernetes clusters in production, define deployment and rollback strategies, and troubleshoot real production issues across both cloud and cluster layers.Security is a first class responsibility. You will design and own identity and access models, RBAC, secrets management, encryption, logging, monitoring, and auditability. Systems are designed assuming failure and attack rather than perfect behaviour.
You will lead cloud level incidents, own post incident reviews, and continuously improve resilience, disaster recovery, and recovery processes.
You will act as the technical authority for the cloud platform, spotting risks early, improving weak areas, and working with an external MSP only where execution support is required, not architectural ownership.
What makes this role attractive
- True end-to-end platform ownership in production
- High trust, high autonomy engineering environment
- Direct impact on a mission critical system
- No corporate IT distractions or ticket-driven work
- Opportunity to shape a cloud platform properly, rather than inherit constraints
- A role that values judgement, experience, and technical depth over process
What excellence looks like to us
- You have built and operated production systems on Azure and Kubernetes.
- You have personally owned infrastructure, security, deployments, and incidents.
- You are comfortable discussing failures openly and explaining what you changed afterwards.You enjoy being accountable and trusted rather than over managed.
Not suitable
- Azure only profiles with superficial Kubernetes exposure.Kubernetes specialists without strong Azure and identity fundamentals.Engineers from heavily supported environments without genuine platform ownership.
Required expereince
- Strong hands-on Azure cloud engineering experience.Strong hands-on Kubernetes / AKS experience in production.Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.Deep understanding of cloud security, identity, and networking.Experience owning live, business critical environments.
Nice to have
- Fintech, trading, or other security sensitive environment experience.
- Experience taking over and improving existing cloud platforms.
- Experience designing and testing disaster recovery strategies.
This role is for engineers who want meaningful ownership, real technical influence, and a platform that genuinely matters to the business.
If the above role is of interest, please contact Lorenz Pasch @ Hays Recruitment ASAP.
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