Senior Cloud Ops Engineer

About the Role

As a Senior Cloud Operations Engineer you will design, implement and operate Southern Water’s Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure, ensuring services are available, secure, efficient and cost‑effective. You will manage compute, storage, networking and identity resources while supporting advanced PaaS and analytics platforms, and act as a trusted delivery partner for internal project teams. The position requires a hands‑on approach, applying DevOps and automation principles to reduce manual effort, accelerate delivery and improve resilience. You will develop and sustain cloud Landing Zones, enforce security and governance, contribute to FinOps cost optimisation, and support disaster recovery and business continuity planning. • Build, configure, and maintain Azure IaaS, PaaS, storage, networking, and identity services. • Deploy and manage Azure Landing Zones following enterprise architecture standards. • Migrate workloads from IaaS to modern PaaS solutions. • Implement Infrastructure as Code using Bicep, ARM templates, or Terraform. • Automate provisioning, scaling, and maintenance via DevOps pipelines and scripts (PowerShell, Azure CLI). • Monitor system health, respond to incidents, conduct root cause analysis, and drive continuous improvement. • Enforce cloud security best practices, including RBAC, encryption, and secure networking. • Ensure compliance with internal policies and regulatory standards, collaborating with security and audit teams. • Optimize cloud spend through right‑sizing, cost‑management tools, and FinOps reporting. • Document SOPs, configurations, and runbooks to support knowledge sharing. • Act as escalation point for cloud incidents and support service transitions and training. • Implement and test disaster recovery and business continuity plans meeting RTO/RPO targets. • Stay updated on Azure innovations and recommend improvements.

Key Responsibilities

• ▸azure infra
• ▸landing zones
• ▸iac automation
• ▸devops pipelines
• ▸cloud monitoring
• ▸finops

What You Bring

Candidates need a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience, extensive Azure expertise, and strong knowledge of landing zone architecture. Required skills include Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), scripting (Python, PowerShell), cloud security, networking, DevOps practices and FinOps cost management. Key capabilities include scaling and performance optimisation, robust troubleshooting, thorough documentation, clear communication with technical and non‑technical stakeholders, and the ability to mentor and train team members. A commitment to continuous learning and staying current with emerging cloud technologies is essential. All employees are part of an incident‑support team that provides 24/7 coverage to ensure rapid resolution of service issues. During the interview process you will discuss any on‑call rota requirements, and you must be eligible to work in the UK and provide the necessary documentation.

Requirements

• ▸azure
• ▸terraform
• ▸docker
• ▸python
• ▸devops
• ▸bachelor's

Benefits

Southern Water offers a comprehensive benefits package: 25 days of annual leave plus bank holidays, pension contributions up to 11%, health provisions such as free flu jabs and eye‑test vouchers, life assurance at four times salary, an electric‑car salary‑sacrifice scheme, employee assistance, discount programmes, volunteering days, study support and flexible working where possible. • Approx. £70K salary plus performance bonus. • 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays. • Pension contributions up to 11%. • Health benefits: free flu jab, eye test vouchers, health cash plan, digital GP. • Employee assistance, life assurance 4× salary, and disability insurance. • Electric car salary‑sacrifice scheme after 6 months. • Discount programmes with 800+ retailers, sports and social clubs. • Two paid volunteering days and study support for job‑related qualifications. • Flexible working arrangements considered.

Work Environment

Hybrid