DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer – AWS

*Role Overview *

We are looking for a hands-on DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to take end-to-end operational ownership of our AWS environments and the infrastructure that supports our applications. The role goes beyond CI/CD and cloud provisioning. You will be expected to understand how production systems are built, how traffic and data flow through them, what can fail, how quickly they can be recovered, and how the architecture should evolve as usage grows.

You will work closely with software engineering teams across modern and legacy application stacks. The objective is simple: production systems should be observable, recoverable, secure, scalable, cost-conscious and safe to change.

*Core Outcomes *

1. Availability
   Production services are monitored, stable and designed to avoid unnecessary single points of failure.

2. Recoverability
   Every critical system has a documented backup and recovery path, with restores tested rather than assumed.

3. Security
   Cloud access, networks, secrets, operating systems and production environments are appropriately protected and auditable.

4. Scalability
   Infrastructure can grow with product usage without relying on manual capacity increases or unnecessary complexity.

5. Cost Efficiency
   AWS architecture and resource usage are reviewed continuously so spend remains justified by business and technical requirements.

6. Operational Control
   Deployments, configuration changes and incident response are repeatable, traceable and safe.

*Key Responsibilities *

1. AWS Infrastructure & Production Operations

• Manage development, staging and production AWS infrastructure across compute, networking, storage, databases and supporting services.
• Operate and troubleshoot services including EC2, VPC, subnets, routing, NAT, load balancers, Auto Scaling, RDS/Aurora, S3, CloudFront, Route 53, IAM, CloudWatch and related AWS services.
• Maintain DNS, SSL/TLS, security groups, network routes, environment configuration and production access controls.
• Understand complete request paths from DNS/CDN and load balancers through reverse proxies, application services, databases, caches and third-party dependencies.
• Support mixed application environments including Linux-hosted Java, .NET, Node.js and similar backend workloads; troubleshoot systemd, processes, ports, resource limits, service dependencies and Nginx/reverse-proxy behaviour.

1. Business Continuity, Backup & Disaster Recovery

• Maintain an accurate inventory of production systems, servers, databases, storage, critical dependencies and recovery requirements.
• Define and implement backup policies, retention, automated snapshots and appropriate off-instance/off-account protection for critical systems.
• Ensure backups are monitored for success and failure; do not rely on unverified backup jobs.
• Define practical Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) targets for critical systems with stakeholders.
• Create documented recovery procedures and perform scheduled restore/recovery tests to prove that production services and data can actually be recovered.
• Review architecture for single points of failure, restart/reboot risks and dependency failures, and implement practical resilience improvements.
• Ensure critical services restart correctly after server or instance recovery and are covered by health checks and alerts.

1. Cloud Architecture, Scalability & Cost Optimisation

• Review proposed and existing architectures for reliability, scale, cost and operational complexity before adding infrastructure.
• Select the appropriate AWS service and architecture for the workload rather than defaulting to heavyweight technologies.
• Evaluate trade-offs across EC2, ECS/Fargate, EKS, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, Redis/ElastiCache, S3/CloudFront and other managed AWS services.
• Advise on messaging and event-driven patterns such as SNS/SQS, EventBridge, Kinesis and Kafka/Amazon MSK based on throughput, ordering, replay, retention, consumer model, availability and operational cost.
• Design asynchronous patterns where appropriate, including queues, workers, retry policies, dead-letter queues and failure isolation, while coordinating application-level concerns such as idempotency with developers.
• Design for horizontal scaling and remove avoidable capacity bottlenecks or single-instance dependencies.
• Review AWS spend by workload; identify idle or oversized compute/database resources, unnecessary storage, inefficient data transfer/NAT usage and avoidable managed-service costs.
• Recommend Auto Scaling, caching, lifecycle policies, Savings Plans/Reserved capacity, serverless or other optimisations where they are technically and commercially justified.
• Use AWS Budgets/Cost Explorer or equivalent controls to detect abnormal spend and provide regular cost optimisation recommendations.

1. Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD & Controlled Releases

• Provision and manage infrastructure using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation or AWS CDK, with Terraform preferred.
• Keep infrastructure configuration version-controlled, reproducible and auditable; reduce unmanaged manual changes and configuration drift.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline or equivalent tooling.
• Maintain clear separation between development, staging and production environments, credentials and configuration.
• Support controlled production releases including scoped changes, release branches, selective promotion/cherry-picking where required, rollback plans and post-deployment verification.
• Protect environment-specific configuration and secrets during builds, deployments and rollback operations.
• Automate routine infrastructure and operational tasks using Bash, Python or equivalent scripting languages.

1. Observability, Reliability & Incident Response

• Implement useful monitoring, logging and alerting across infrastructure, operating systems, reverse proxies, applications, databases and external dependencies.
• Use CloudWatch and, where relevant, tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, OpenSearch/ELK or Datadog to provide actionable observability rather than alert noise.
• Correlate logs and metrics across layers to isolate whether an incident originates in DNS/CDN, networking, load balancers, Nginx/proxies, server processes, application services, databases/caches or downstream providers.
• Investigate production incidents methodically, restore service safely, preserve relevant evidence/logs, establish root cause and drive preventive actions.
• Diagnose timeout, connectivity, resource exhaustion, process failure, certificate, CORS, presigned URL, request-expiry/time-skew and cross-service dependency issues.
• Help engineering teams design sensible timeouts, retries, health checks and dependency isolation so a slow downstream service does not unnecessarily take down an API or user flow.
• Maintain operational runbooks and clear escalation procedures for common production failures.

1. Security, Access & Infrastructure Governance

• Manage IAM users, roles and policies following least-privilege principles and maintain appropriate separation of production access.
• Manage secrets and credentials using appropriate solutions such as AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store; support rotation and removal of unmanaged credentials.
• Maintain encryption, certificates, audit trails and infrastructure security controls using services such as KMS, ACM, CloudTrail, Config, WAF, GuardDuty or Security Hub where appropriate.
• Own operating-system and infrastructure patching, vulnerability remediation and lifecycle risks for managed production hosts.
• Review public exposure, open ports, security groups, stale access and other infrastructure risks regularly.
• Maintain current architecture diagrams, server/service inventories, dependencies, deployment procedures, backup policies and recovery documentation so infrastructure knowledge is not dependent on one person.

*Required Skills & Experience *

• 3+ years of experience in DevOps, Cloud Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, SRE or a closely related role.
• At least 2 years of hands-on experience supporting real production workloads on AWS.
• Strong Linux administration and production troubleshooting skills, including systemd/process management and Nginx or similar reverse proxies.
• Strong understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, VPCs, subnets, routing, NAT, load balancing, firewalls and security groups.
• Hands-on Infrastructure as Code experience, preferably Terraform.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines and Git-based release workflows.
• Experience implementing monitoring, centralized logging and production alerting.
• Practical experience with backups, restoration and disaster-recovery procedures for production systems.
• Working knowledge of relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL from an infrastructure/operations perspective.
• Understanding of IAM, secrets management, encryption and cloud security fundamentals.
• Understanding of distributed-system and messaging concepts, including queues, retries, dead-letter handling and failure isolation.
• Ability to assess AWS architecture choices based on reliability, scalability, security, cost and operational complexity.
• Ability to automate operational work using Bash, Python or a similar scripting language.

*Preferred / Good to Have *

• Docker and containerized application experience.
• Experience with AWS ECS/Fargate; EKS/Kubernetes exposure is useful but not mandatory.
• Experience with SNS, SQS, EventBridge, Lambda, Kinesis and/or Kafka/Amazon MSK.
• Experience with Ansible or another configuration-management tool.
• Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, OpenSearch/ELK, Datadog or similar observability tooling.
• Experience supporting microservices and Java, .NET, Node.js or similar backend environments.
• Exposure to AWS Organizations, multi-account design, AWS Backup, WAF, GuardDuty, Security Hub or Config.
• Experience with cloud cost optimisation / FinOps practices.
• AWS, Terraform or Kubernetes certifications are advantageous, but practical production experience is more important.

*What Strong Candidates Should Be Able to Demonstrate *

• Take an unfamiliar AWS environment and map what is running, how traffic flows, where data lives, what depends on what, and what could take the service down.
• Explain how they would establish whether every production system is genuinely backed up and recoverable — including how they would test restoration.
• Troubleshoot a production outage across DNS, CDN/load balancer, Nginx, Linux processes, application services, database/cache and third-party dependencies.
• Challenge an unnecessarily complex architecture and explain when a managed AWS pattern such as SNS/SQS or EventBridge is more appropriate than Kafka/MSK — and when Kafka is justified.
• Explain how they would scale a growing workload while controlling AWS spend and avoiding premature over-engineering.
• Plan a production change with clear rollback, configuration protection, verification and minimal blast radius.
• Communicate incident findings, architecture recommendations and operational risks clearly to both developers and management.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field is preferred. Equivalent demonstrable professional experience may also be considered.

Please send your CV at [email protected]