Senior Cloud Architect

Overview

Senior Cloud Architect to join our team. Architect and implement robust AWS-based systems that meet high standards for scalability, performance, and security for our Payments and Foreign Exchange (FX) business. This role requires a hands-on cloud architect with extensive AWS expertise, promoting best practices in infrastructure-as-code, security, and DevSecOps within a fast-paced financial technology environment, ensuring alignment with business goals and driving innovation.

Role Responsibilities

• As a senior member of the Engineering and Architecture team, collaborate with development teams to design and implement cloud-native application architectures on AWS that are highly available, scalable, and secure, ensuring solutions meet business needs while aligning with cloud best practices and compliance requirements.
• Partner with the Platform engineering team to create reusable cloud design patterns and blueprints/modules (Infrastructure as Code templates) for provisioning and hosting applications on AWS to ensure architectural consistency and governance across teams, reducing duplicate efforts.
• Design and oversee AWS networking configurations (VPCs, subnets, routing) and multi-account setups. Implement cloud security standards, including network segmentation and security groups, identity & access management, and encryption.
• Drive automation across the cloud environment using Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK to provision resources in a repeatable manner.
• Collaborate with the security team to implement security best practices, including identity management, encryption, compliance (such as GDPR and ISO 27001), and threat detection and vulnerability management (e.g., Inspector, Security Hub, GuardDuty).
• Monitor and optimise AWS environments for performance, cost, and efficiency (right-sizing, auto-scaling, etc.). Implement monitoring and logging solutions (such as CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and X-Ray) to track performance and troubleshoot issues.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, promoting AWS well-architected best practices and guiding engineers in cloud-native design and troubleshooting.
• Engage with senior technology leadership and stakeholders to communicate architectural decisions, technical risks, and opportunities.

Qualifications

• Proven practical experience of AWS services including account management, networking, security and identity, compute, storage, databases, and messaging.
• Established cloud architecture principles, patterns, and guardrails to guide the design and development of solution architectures.
• Extensive experience with AWS core services such as AWS Organisations, S3, EC2, ECS, ECR, KMS, RDS, SQS, SNS, Lambda, VPC, IAM, API Gateway, etc.
• Strong understanding of AWS networking and security controls. Expertise in designing secure VPCs (subnets, routing, NACLs) and implementing network security measures (security groups, firewalls), as well as identity management (AWS IAM). Knowledge of cloud security best practices (encryption, key management, vulnerability management) and experience in securing mission-critical workloads.
• Strong knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code tools, particularly Terraform, and creating reusable Terraform modules. Ability to define and deploy cloud infrastructure through code for consistency and repeatability.
• Experience in designing architectures for high availability and fault tolerance, using multi-AZ and multi-region strategies, load balancing, and auto-scaling.
• Experience in setting up multi-account AWS environments or landing zones (e.g., using AWS Organisations/Control Tower) to enforce governance and isolation between workloads and implementing backup strategies and disaster recovery plans on AWS to ensure business continuity.
• Knowledge of modern software development practices, such as Test-Driven Development (TDD), CI/CD (using tools like GitHub and GitHub Actions), DevSecOps, SRE, etc.
• Knowledge of machine learning and AI applications in financial services.

Additional Information

• Hybrid working
• Contributory personal pension plan: - Minimum: Employee 2% and Employer 7%. Employer matches contributions in 1% increments to a maximum of: Employee 5% and Employer 10%
• Life Assurance – 4 times annual salary
• Group Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance – may include cover for partner and/or children at company cost. Cover includes Optical, Dental and Audiology
• Discretionary Bonus
• Competitive Annual Leave
• 2 Volunteering Days
• Benefit Hub

London, England, United Kingdom

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