Lead Cloud Engineer

We’re looking for a Lead Cloud Engineer who is first and foremost a people leader, with strong cloud engineering experience to guide technical direction. You’ll be responsible for building, coaching, and scaling a high-performing cloud engineering team, while setting strategy and standards for our cloud platform.

This role blends line management, delivery leadership, and technical oversight. You’ll create the environment where your team can do their best work, make sound technical decisions, and continuously improve.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll be technically deep, set standards, mentor engineers, and drive platform improvements that drive efficiency and make systems more resilient.

Technical Leadership:

• Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure for our Totara Hosting solution.
• Extend platform functionality and implement new features to meet evolving client needs.
• Provide expert technical support, including participation in an on-call rota to ensure availability outside normal working hours.
• Collaborate across departments, communicating effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Evolve a highly automated, secure, and resilient hosting platform serving thousands of learning sites across multiple regions
• Mentor and coach engineers; conduct design reviews and raise the bar on engineering quality

People Leadership and Team Development:

• Line manage a team of UK based Cloud Engineers, providing regular 1:1s, feedback, and career coaching.
• Create clear role expectations, development plans, and progression paths.
• Support hiring, onboarding, and team growth as the platform scales.
• Foster a healthy, inclusive team culture focused on learning, accountability, and psychological safety.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Proven experience line managing a remote working engineering team, including performance management, coaching, and career development.
• Experience building and maintaining high-performing, engaged teams, including hiring, onboarding, and succession planning.
• Familiar with modern project management and delivery processes such as scrum and kanban.
• Strong capability in mentoring senior engineers and supporting progression into leadership or specialist roles.
• Proven experience with AWS services: EC2, EKS, SES, ECR, RDS, S3, WAF
• Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes in production environments
• Knowledge of Terraform and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Proficiency with Linux distributions (Alpine, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux)
• Experience managing PostgreSQL databases
• Solid understanding of Git workflows and version control
• Experience designing and building CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with DevOps principles and cloud security best practices
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills

Bonus Skills:

• Implementation experience with multi-tenanted SaaS or PaaS solutions
• Knowledge of monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana)
• Understanding of Linux containers, especially containerd.
• Scripting skills (e.g., Python, Bash)

Perks and Benefits:

• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Private Healthcare
• Life Insurance 4x Salary
• Professional Development Opportunities
• Annual Wellbeing Allowance
• New Joiner home working set-up allowance
• Additional Paid Leave: Birthday off, Working days between Christmas and New Years Eve

We’re committed to building a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace where everyone feels they belong. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and experiences, and we’re happy to make adjustments to support you through the recruitment process - please just let us know.