Cloud Operations Specialist

Old Mutual South Africa; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 600,000 - 1,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Old Mutual South Africa is seeking a Cloud Operations Specialist to manage and optimise our cloud infrastructure, ensuring high availability, security, and cost discipline. The role focuses on monitoring, incident response, routine maintenance, and automation work with infrastructure as code.

Lead the Cloud Operations team, participate in on-call rotations, and drive continuous improvement in cloud cost management and governance across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent qualification.
• 4 years of professional cloud operations experience.
• Relevant cloud certification(s).

Responsibilities

• Manage and maintain cloud infrastructure for high availability, performance and security.
• Monitor systems, perform incident response and routine maintenance.
• Lead FinOps initiatives, cost visibility, tagging and rightsizing.
• Support automation tooling and runbooks with IaC workflows.

Skills

AWS

Azure

Google Cloud

DevOps

Terraform

Python

Bash

PowerShell

Cloud Monitoring

Cloud Security

Cloud Networking

Agile SAFe

Scripting & Automation

Troubleshooting

FinOps

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Python

Bash

PowerShell

Job description

Let's Write Africa's Story Together!

Old Mutual is a firm believer in the African opportunity and our diverse talent reflects this.

Let's Write Africa's Story Together!

Old Mutual is a firm believer in the African opportunity and our diverse talent reflects this.

Job Description

The Cloud Operations Specialist is part of the team that is responsible for managing and maintaining Old Mutual's cloud infrastructure, ensuring high availability, performance, and security. The role is primarily operational in nature — focused on monitoring, incident response, system maintenance, patching, and the reliable day-to-day running of cloud platforms and shared services.

Cloud Operations Specialists work closely with Cloud Engineers, consuming and extending the automation tooling and infrastructure built by engineering teams. They are expected to write and maintain operational scripts to support their work, but their primary output is stable, well-operated cloud environments rather than the delivery of new features or platform capabilities.

A key and ongoing responsibility of this role is cloud cost management and FinOps practice. Cloud Operations Specialists are the primary owners of day-to-day spend visibility, waste identification, rightsizing, and cost reporting. Optimising cloud spend is not a periodic task — it is a continuous operational discipline embedded in the daily and weekly rhythm of the role.

This role additionally carries formal people management responsibility, leading the Cloud Operations team, managing team performance and development and acting as the senior escalation point for operational issues.

Infrastructure Operations & Availability

• Manage and maintain cloud infrastructure to ensure high availability, performance, and security.
• Assist in the deployment, configuration, and management of cloud resources in line with engineering-defined standards.
• Perform regular system maintenance, updates, backups, and patching to keep cloud environments secure and up-to-date.
• Manage infrastructure availability, resilience, and disaster recovery procedures.

Monitoring & Capacity Management

• Monitor cloud systems and services to ensure optimal performance.
• Implement and manage monitoring systems and monitoring reporting in line with engineering-defined requirements.
• Monitor, report, and manage cloud platform and shared services capacity.
• Optimize cloud resource usage and costs, providing recommendations for improvements.
• Monitor cost and usage dashboards daily; identify anomalies, unexpected spend spikes, or untagged resources and elevate or remediate promptly.

Incident Management & Support

• Respond to and resolve cloud-related incidents and service requests per SLA.
• Participate in on-call rotations to provide 24/7 support for critical cloud operations.
• Perform Tier-2 troubleshooting and elevate complex or recurring issues to Cloud Engineering for root cause analysis and remediation.
• Collaborate with development and engineering teams to support cloud-based applications and services.

FinOps & Cloud Cost Optimisation

• Contribute to cloud cost visibility tooling and dashboards (e.g. AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing, Custom Implementations), ensuring spend is accurately tagged and attributable to teams, products, and environments.
• Perform regular (at minimum once per sprint) reviews of cloud spend to identify waste, idle resources, oversized instances, unattached storage, and unused reservations.
• Execute rightsizing recommendations generated by cloud-native tooling and engineering — resize, downgrade, or terminate resources within agreed operational parameters.
• Consult on Reserved Instance / Savings Plan / Committed Use Discount coverage, flagging expiries and utilization gaps to FinOps and management.
• Enforce and monitor resource tagging compliance; identify and remediate untagged or incorrectly tagged resources using automation tooling provided by engineering.
• Consult and operate automated cost governance policies (budget alerts, anomaly detection rules, resource lifecycle schedules such as start/stop automation).
• Identify and implement quick-win cost reduction opportunities (e.g. storage tier transitions, snapshot cleanup, log retention enforcement) within operational authority.
• Contribute operational context and findings to quarterly FinOps reviews and cost deep-dives.
• Collaborate with Cloud Engineering to raise architectural cost drivers that require design changes beyond operational remediation.

Automation & Operational Scripting

• Operate and execute automation tooling and IaC workflows authored and maintained by Cloud Engineers.
• Write and maintain operational scripts (Terraform, Python, Bash, or PowerShell) to support day-to-day maintenance, remediation, and reporting tasks.
• Contribute improvements to runbooks and operational automation, working in partnership with engineering for any changes to production IaC or platform tooling.

Governance, Security & Compliance

• Ensure compliance with security policies, organizational governance standards, and industry regulations.
• Perform access reviews, security patching, and policy compliance checks within cloud environments.

Documentation & Continuous Improvement

• Develop and maintain documentation for cloud operations processes, runbooks, and procedures.
• Identify and communicate operational improvement opportunities to Cloud Engineering.
• Participate in post-incident reviews and contribute to continuous improvement initiatives.

Minimum Requirements

• A numerate Bachelor's Degree (e.g. Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering) with minimum or equivalent technical qualification.
• 4years of professional experience
• Relevant cloud certification.

Technical Experience requirements

• Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google
• DevOps
• Cloud Operations practices
• Problem solving and trouble shooting skills
• Infrastructure as code (Eg, Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Cloud security
• Cloud Networking
• Agile/SAFe
• Coding and scripting (Eg. Python, Bash, Powershell)
• Scripting and Automation (Eg. Python, Bash, Powershell)
• Cloud Monitoring
• Cloud Compliance

Skills

Adaptive Thinking, Change Management, Change Process Management, Cloud skill Accountability, Cloud skill Business Insights, Cloud skill Complexity Management, Cultivates Innovation, Current State Analysis, Data Compilation, Enterprise Readiness Assessment, IT Network Security, Performance Gap Analysis, Plans and Aligns, Policy Development, Project Integration Management, Project Life Cycle Management, Strategic Planning

Competencies

Education

Diploma (Dip) (Required)

Closing Date

27 August 2026 , 23:59

The appointment will be made from the designated group in line with the Employment Equity Plan of Old Mutual South Africa and the specific business unit in question.

The Old Mutual Story!