Senior Cloud Engineer

About Smart Working
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Our mission is simple: to break down geographic barriers and connect skilled professionals with outstanding global teams and products for full-time, long-term roles. We help you discover meaningful work with teams that invest in your success, where you’re empowered to grow personally and professionally.

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About the Role
As a Senior Cloud & Backend Engineer, you will take ownership of improving and scaling a cloud-agnostic AWS platform while contributing to the development of backend services and new product functionality.

Your primary focus will be strengthening infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, software supply-chain security, monitoring and alerting. You will also develop backend capabilities supporting access control, metrics ingestion and multi-tenancy.

Working closely with a small engineering team, you will contribute to platform maturity, product development and long-term technical improvements. This role requires an independent engineer who can take ownership, challenge technical decisions constructively and deliver reliable solutions. Frontend development experience would be beneficial but is not essential.

Responsibilities:

• Develop, maintain and improve AWS cloud infrastructure using Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Strengthen and improve existing IaC configurations, infrastructure reliability and platform maturity.
• Own, maintain and optimise CI/CD pipelines, primarily using GitHub Actions, with Jenkins integrations where applicable.
• Implement and improve software supply-chain security processes, including Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), container image signing and verification.
• Improve AWS monitoring, alerting and operational visibility across the platform.
• Manage Docker-based container deployments and orchestration using ECS and/or Kubernetes.
• Support ECS Anywhere deployments running across self-managed EC2 instances.
• Work with AWS services, including EC2, ECS, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB and Lambda.
• Develop and enhance backend microservices, primarily written in Java.
• Implement new backend features and functionality supporting role-based access control (RBAC).
• Develop backend capabilities for metrics ingestion and processing.
• Implement backend functionality supporting multi-tenancy.
• Manage application deployments, troubleshoot infrastructure issues and resolve CI/CD pipeline failures independently.
• Support cloud and on-premises deployment environments, including opportunities to improve consistency between them.
• Identify opportunities to improve platform reliability, performance, security and delivery quality.
• Contribute to cloud cost optimisation while maintaining a cloud-agnostic approach and avoiding unnecessary vendor lock-in.
• Identify technical gaps, propose improvements and contribute proactively to product and platform development.
• Collaborate with other engineers, share technical knowledge and challenge technical decisions constructively.
• Use AI-assisted development tools responsibly, reviewing and taking ownership of generated code and integrations.

• Senior-level hands-on experience in cloud engineering, platform engineering or DevOps, with the ability to independently own infrastructure and backend development work.
• Strong practical experience with AWS infrastructure and core services, including EC2, ECS, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB and Lambda.
• Strong hands-on experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Proven experience designing, maintaining and improving CI/CD pipelines, ideally using GitHub Actions. Equivalent experience with GitLab CI/CD or Jenkins is acceptable where transferable expertise can be demonstrated.
• Knowledge and practical experience of software supply-chain security, including SBOMs, signed container images and image verification.
• Experience implementing and maintaining cloud monitoring and alerting solutions.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, containerised services and container orchestration using ECS and/or Kubernetes.
• Strong backend development experience, with the ability to independently implement new features and functionality in microservices.
• Experience with Java-based backend services, or relevant backend development expertise applicable to Java microservices.
• Ability to develop backend functionality involving access control, metrics ingestion and multi-tenancy.
• Experience troubleshooting production infrastructure, deployment pipelines and backend services.
• Understanding of platform reliability, maintainability, security and continuous improvement.
• Ability to work independently, take ownership of technical decisions and contribute beyond assigned development tasks.
• Strong collaboration, knowledge-sharing and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to propose and justify technical improvements constructively.

• Experience developing frontend features and functionality, particularly around multi-tenancy and dashboard sharing.
• Experience integrating metrics visualisations using native frontend graphing libraries, including migrating dashboards from Grafana.
• Experience with Kubernetes deployments across on-premises and cloud environments.
• Knowledge of security and compliance frameworks, including ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials and secure SDLC practices.
• Experience with cloud cost optimisation (FinOps) and cloud-agnostic infrastructure.