Senior Cloud Engineer

CreateFuture; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

35 days leave

Private medical insurance

Enhanced parental leave

40 hours of paid learning and dev

Job summary

CreateFuture in the United Kingdom is hiring a Senior Cloud Engineer to lead delivery of AI-native platforms, bridging infrastructure, software development and data engineering for client projects.

You will mentor engineers, establish best practices, and collaborate with client stakeholders to deliver robust, scalable cloud solutions in a hybrid work model with Manchester as one of the hubs.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience across infra, software and data engineering.
• Proven ability to design scalable cloud solutions in multi-client environments.
• Experience with AI-native platforms and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong collaboration and mentoring skills in delivery teams.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across cloud delivery engagements.
• Bridge infrastructure, software, and data engineering for implementations.
• Mentor engineers and set engineering standards.
• Collaborate with clients and stakeholders to meet timelines.

Skills

Infrastructure as Code

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitHub Actions

AI agents

Data pipelines

Cloud platforms

Tools

dbt

Airflow

Kafka

AWS Kinesis

Vector databases

GitOps tooling

Job description

Working at CreateFutureCreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference while always putting people first.

We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years.

• 35 days leave (including bank holidays).
• Private medical insurance.
• Enhanced parental and adoption leave.
• 40 hours of paid learning and development.

Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today.

At CreateFuture, the Senior Cloud Engineer is a vital individual contributor and a technical driving force within our delivery teams. You will work closely with clients and delivery teams to bridge the implementation gap, assisting with architectural designs and transforming them into production systems using autonomous and AI-native platforms.

This role requires a modern, hybrid engineering approach, blending infrastructure mastery with software development and data engineering principles. You will act as a technical expert on projects, building trusted relationships with client stakeholders, establishing engineering best practices, and mentoring engineers within the Cloud capability. Furthermore, you will actively contribute to setting engineering standards that influence the whole CreateFuture organisation.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Delivery & Implementation

• High-Quality Execution: Proactively contribute to project teams by providing technical guidance, resolving complex technical blockages, supporting migration efforts and writing high-quality, spec-driven code.
• Platform Engineering: Build and maintain independent, self-service developer platforms that allow engineering teams to spin up compliant, ephemerally environments automatically using GitOps workflows.
• AI & Agentic Infrastructure: Implement the data pipelines, workflow orchestrations, and specialised compute footprints needed to support enterprise AI applications, using technologies like AWS Bedrock and AWS AgentCore.
• Observability & Reliability: Build robust monitoring and observability pipelines to ensure the health, performance, and security of distributed cloud applications and AI models.
• FinOps Standards: Embed automated cost-estimation tools into the standard CI/CD deployment pipelines, ensuring auto-shutdown policies and resource optimisation are configured by default.

Consultancy & Client Alignment

• Client Advisory: Collaborate with diverse stakeholders, including tech leads, project managers, and enterprise architects, to ensure successful project delivery according to timelines and budgets.
• Commercial Growth: Have a growth mindset on projects, recognising potential operational bottlenecks or new requirements, and own communicating these throughout the team for new opportunities.
• Best Practice Champion: Establish best practice tools and processes within client environments, confidently challenging legacy ways of working where appropriate.

Capability & Leadership Support

• Mentoring: Support and mentor engineers within CreateFuture and our client teams, helping them navigate their learning and technical skill gaps.
• Community Contribution: Actively engage in the internal engineering communities, helping to build out an internal repository of reference architectures, Infrastructure as Code templates, and technical blogs.
• Culture and Feedback: Help foster an inclusive, collaborative, and psychologically safe team environment by providing timely, open, and honest technical feedback.

Skills & Experience

Core Technical Capabilities

Candidates must demonstrate a hybrid balance across the three strategic pillars: Software Engineering (30%), Infrastructure (40%), and Data Engineering (30%).

• Infrastructure & Automation (40%): Lots of experience in writing declarative Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, container orchestration with Kubernetes (managing clusters, nodes, and pods), and building CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions.
• Software & Agentic Engineering (30%): Proficiency with modern scripting languages for building custom AI agents, configuring workflow orchestration, connecting enterprise API integrations, and implementing agentic guardrails.
• Data Engineering (30%): Practical experience implementing components of data pipelines, including real-time streaming tools (AWS Kinesis, Kafka), data orchestration (dbt, Airflow), and managing Vector Databases for RAG architectures.
• Observability & Cost Management: SRE/Platform experience with the practical application of real-time monitoring and cloud cost optimisation using native CSP tools or utilities like Infracost and Karpenter.

Domain & Sector Experience

• Regulated Industries: Experience delivering secure platforms within highly regulated environments, such as iGaming, Financial Services, or banking, where Zero Trust security and strict compliance controls are mandatory, is highly advantageous.
• Consulting: Proven experience operating in a client-facing or consulting engineering role, demonstrating strong communication skills, relationship-building capabilities, and adaptability across changing technical contexts.

Preferred Knowledge-level & Certifications

• Associate-level cloud certifications (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect Associate or Azure AZ-104).
• At least 1 professional-level certification.
• Progressing toward or holding multiple professional certifications such as CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator), AWS ML Engineer Associate, or FinOps Certified Practitioner.

What we’ll offer you:

We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do.

We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed.

We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.

Our hiring process

We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process.

It usually looks like this:

• Call with our Talent Acquisition Team
• Role specific capability interview

Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens.

Inclusion at CreateFuture

We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work.

If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help.

We look forward to your application!

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