Cloud Infrastructure Tech Lead

What you’ll do

The Cloud Infrastructure Tech Lead role helps teams (such as product teams, platform teams and application teams) to successfully adopt cloud infrastructure and platform services. It is heavily involved in design and implementation activities that result in new or improved cloud-related capabilities, and it brings skills and expertise to such areas as cloud technical architecture (for a workload’s use of infrastructure as a service [IaaS] and platform as a service [PaaS] components); automating cloud management tasks, provisioning and configuration management; and other aspects involved in preparing and optimizing cloud solutions. 

Successful outcomes are likely to embrace infrastructure-as-code (IaC), DevOps and Agile ways of working and associated automation approaches, all underpinned by the Tech Lead’s solid understanding of networking and security in the cloud. The nature of the work involved means that the cloud infrastructure engineer will directly engage with customer teams but will also work on cloud infrastructure platform capabilities that span multiple teams. 

The Tech Lead collaborates closely with cloud architects, product/platform teams, software developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), security, and network specialists, as well as other roles, particularly those in the infrastructure and operations. Being an approachable team-player is therefore crucial for success, and willingness to lead initiatives is important too.  The Tech Lead also supports colleagues with complex (escalated) operational concerns in areas such as deployment activities, event management, incident and problem management, availability, capacity and service-level management, as well as service continuity. 

Key Accountabilities:

• Provide expert knowledge on cloud infrastructure and platforms, to ensure our organization achieves its goals for cloud adoption. This involves translating cloud strategy and architecture into efficient, resilient, and secure technical implementations. 
• Offer cloud-engineering thought leadership in areas such as Compute and Data 
• Support and mentor architects working on new cloud solutions including analysing requirements, supporting technical architecture activities, prototyping, design and development of infrastructure artifacts, testing, implementation, and the preparation for ongoing support. 
• Work on cloud migration projects, including analysing requirements and backlogs, identifying migration techniques, developing migration artifacts, executing processes, and ensuring preparations for ongoing support. 
• Design, build, deliver, maintain and improve infrastructure solutions. This includes automation strategies such as IaC, configuration-as-code, policy-as-code, release orchestration and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and collaborative ways of working (e.g., DevOps). Participate in change and release management processes, carrying out complex provisioning and configuration tasks manually, where needed. 
• Improve reliability, scalability and efficiency by working with product engineers and site reliability engineers to ensure well-architected and thoughtfully operationalized cloud infrastructures. This includes assisting with nonfunctional requirements, such as data protection, high availability, disaster recovery, monitoring requirements and efficiency considerations in different environments. 
• Provide subject matter expertise for all approved IaaS and PaaS services, respond promptly to escalated incidents and requests, and build reusable artifacts ready for deployment to cloud environments. 

Who you are

• Experience with these cloud provider services is essential: AWS, Azure  
• DevOps-tooling such as CI/CD (e.g., Jenkins, Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps/ADO, TeamCity, GitHub, GitLab) 
• Infrastructure-as-code approaches, role-specific automation tools and associated programming languages Ansible, Terraform, Packer  
• Knowledge of software development frameworks/Languages: Python 
• Container management: Docker, Rancher, Kubernetes, EKS 
• Virtualization platforms: VMware 
• Operating systems: Windows and Linux including scripting experience 
• Database technologies and caching: Postgres, Oracle, MSSQL, NoSQL, Redis, CDN, Mongo 
• Identity and access management: Active Directory/Azure AD 
• Monitoring tools: AWS CloudWatch, Elastic Stack (Elastic Search/Logstash/Kibana), Grafana, Loki 
• Cloud networking Subnetting, Route Tables, Security Groups, VPC, VPC Peering, NACLS, VPN, Transit Gateways, optimizing for egress costs 
• Cloud security key management services, encryption, other core security services/controls the organization uses 
• Scalable architectures, including APIs, microservices and PaaS. 
• Analysing cloud spending and optimizing resources  
• Implementing resilience (e.g., multi-AZ, multi-region, backup and recovery tools) 
• Cloud provider frameworks (e.g., Well-Architected) 
• Working with architecture tools and associated artifacts 

Not a perfect fit?

Worried that you don’t meet all the desired criteria exactly? At Vodafone we are passionate about Inclusion for All and creating a workplace where everyone can thrive, whatever their personal or professional background. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align exactly with every part of the job description, we encourage you to apply as you may be the right candidate for this role or another role, and our recruitment team can help you see how your skills fit in.

What's in it for you

We want you to feel happy and fulfilled at work, without compromising the other things in life that matter to you. There are lots of ways we support this, including hybrid working and generous parental leave. You'll also get four Spirit Days a year to focus on your personal development and wellbeing, plus a host of other great benefits too.

Who we are

You may have already heard of Vodafone - We're a leading Telecommunications company in Europe and Africa. But what you might not know is that we are continuously investing in new technologies to improve the lives of millions of customers, businesses and people around the world, creating a better future for everyone.

As part of our global family, whether that's Vodafone, Vodacom or _VOIS, you'll feel a sense of pride and purpose as you contribute to our culture of innovation. We pursue equality of opportunity and inclusion for all candidates through our employment policies and practices. We recognise and celebrate the importance of diversity and inclusivity in our workspace and we do not tolerate any form of discrimination especially related to but not limited to race, colour, age, veteran status, gender identification, sexual orientation, pregnancy, ethnicity, disability, religion, political affiliation, trade union membership, nationality, indigenous status, medical condition, HIV status, social origin, cultural background, social, or marital status.

Together we can.