Senior Cloud Platform Engineer (Azure)

Location: Mainly remote, with a minimum of once a month in our London office

Who are we?

We’re the original pioneers in connected commerce marketing. Since 2008, we’ve been partnering with major retailers, powering global brands, and building meaningful connections with shoppers.

We simplify the mind-boggling complexity of today’s retail media landscape. We deliver impactful campaigns that connect with people where it matters. We create seamless and personalised shopping experiences. Above all, we deliver amazing results for our partners, driven by our unshakeable desire for growth. Time after time, we change the game. SMG is home to a world-class suite of commerce advertising capabilities powered by data and cutting-edge technology. We constantly push ourselves, our tech and our industry to discover innovative new ways to connect, sell and grow.

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer to design, build and operate the cloud platform that SMG's products run on. The role works in two directions: day to day, you will embed with product squads from discovery to go-live, building the production infrastructure their products need and migrating our remaining AWS workloads into our Azure landing zone. Alongside that, you'll help set the long-term direction of the platform itself: the landing zone, reusable Terraform modules, and the observability and reliability practices that let every squad ship safely without waiting on us.

Platform is currently a small, embedded function. We plan to grow it into a dedicated Platform squad, and you'll be one of the engineers who shapes what that squad becomes.

What you’ll do

• Own and evolve our Azure landing zone and cloud foundations required for SMG’s existing products and future platforms and lead the migration of remaining AWS workloads into it.

• Operate observability and SRE tooling: metrics, tracing and logging. Integrate SMG’s chosen observability platform, with clear SLO dashboards, into all products.

• Contribute to the platform roadmap: spot recurring needs across squads and turn them into shared platform capabilities, prioritised with engineering leadership.

• Build the Terraform modules and pipelines that let squads provision and ship into the landing zone safely.

• Security, compliance and cost governance: embed security best practices, participate in audit remediation, manage cloud cost optimisation and tagging/governance.

• Platform networking and identity: design and operate private networking across the landing zone (hub-spoke VNets, private endpoints, private DNS, ingress) and workload identity (managed identities, workload identity federation for pipelines, Entra ID RBAC).

• Embed with product squads from discovery onwards, shaping infrastructure design before it becomes a delivery problem.

• Enable developer self-service and ownership: mentor engineering teams on SRE practices so teams can reliably operate and own their infrastructure.

• Author clear, actionable, version-controlled runbooks, incident playbooks and onboarding guides that enable developer self-service.

What you'll bring

• You've designed, built and run production cloud infrastructure for a SaaS product, not just the pipelines that deploy to it.

• Hands-on Azure landing zone experience: management groups, hub-spoke networking, private endpoints and private DNS, Azure Policy, Entra ID/RBAC.

• Hands-on AWS experience sufficient to operate existing workloads and migrate workloads off it

• IaC expertise (Terraform strongly preferred; experience with Bicep / ARM is a plus).

• Pipeline authoring in any mainstream CI tool (we use Azure DevOps and Bitbucket).

• Observability tooling: metrics, tracing and logging stacks and experience translating those into SLIs/SLOs, specifically using Datadog.

• Incident management experience, running on-call and leading blameless postmortems.

• Strong scripting and automation skills; comfortable in at least one programming/scripting language.

• Strong documentation skills.

Desirable

• Certifications: AWS and/or Azure certifications (AZ-305 or AZ-700 especially)

• Azure Landing Zones or the Cloud Adoption Framework

• Container platforms such as ACA or AKS

• Hands-on cloud migration experience

• Certifications: AWS and/or Azure certifications (AZ-305 or AZ-700 especially)

• Azure Landing Zones or the Cloud Adoption Framework

• Container platforms such as ACA or AKS

• Hands-on cloud migration experience

We're looking for people who enjoy the buzz of change, the satisfaction of building something better, and the joy of working with a close-knit, values-driven team. If you love variety, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and embrace change with energy, this could be your right role.

Why SMG?

At SMG, we hire for the future, which is fast-moving and changing shape. Do you have the potential to help shape our business? We’re looking for brilliant, diverse talent who want to grow with us - people who are curious, ambitious, and eager to learn, whether as specialists or across teams.

We value those who take ownership of their growth and bring fresh perspectives. That’s why we’re committed to equity, inclusion, and building a place where everyone feels empowered to grow. At SMG, it’s not just about filling a role but building the future together.

● 10% discretionary bonus

● £1,800 yearly wellbeing fund (on top of your salary!)

● Free Headspace subscription

● £500 yearly “Uni Fund” for learning

● 4 extra Wellbeing Days off per year

● Annual Summer conference + year-round celebrations

● 4pm finishes every Friday

● Flexible and hybrid working

Explore all our benefits here

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