Cloud Operations Lead

In this role you lead Cloud Operations for LV='s Microsoft Azure estate, focusing on Azure PaaS and AKS with SRE-inspired practices. You define operational standards, improve resilience and observability, and translate incident insights into lasting improvements. You will work with cross-functional teams to own service outcomes, cost visibility, and secure, scalable cloud operations. This is a hands-on leadership position that shapes how LV= operates in the cloud and drives continuous improvement.

• 30 days' holiday
• Competitive pension scheme with employer match
• Annual bonus scheme
• Private medical insurance
• Flexible benefits including cycle to work
• Discount on life products for you and family

• Establish and lead Cloud Operations with defined ownership, support arrangements, and success metrics
• Improve reliability and observability using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights to create actionable alerts and SLIs/SLAs
• Provide technical leadership during major incidents, coordinate recovery, engage Microsoft support, and drive measurable improvements
• Oversee AKS operations including cluster health, capacity, upgrades, networking, identity, storage, and microservice dependencies
• Strengthen security and governance with Cyber Security on policy compliance, vulnerability remediation, access controls, and identity management
• Own operational FinOps with cost visibility, forecasting, budgeting, anomaly investigation, and optimization
• Drive automation as default via IaC and tools like Terraform, Azure DevOps, PowerShell, and Azure CLI
• Maintain production readiness with runbooks, ownership, recovery plans, and lifecycle management
• Champion AI-assisted engineering with secure, validated automation and documentation

• Extensive experience operating enterprise-scale Microsoft Azure environments
• Strong AKS, Kubernetes, container, and microservices expertise
• Deep knowledge of Azure Monitor, Log Analytics/KQL, Application Insights, Azure Policy, Entra ID, Azure RBAC, Key Vault, and cloud security controls
• Experience in incident, problem, availability, capacity, and continual service improvement disciplines
• Understanding of SRE practices, cloud resilience, and FinOps
• Automation and IaC experience with Terraform, Azure DevOps, PowerShell, and Azure CLI
• Clear communication and stakeholder management across technical and service teams
• Awareness of how AI-assisted engineering can improve cloud operations

• Clear communication
• Stakeholder management
• Calm and structured under pressure
• Azure PaaS
• AKS/Kubernetes
• Containerization and microservices