Lead Cloud Platform Engineer

ABOUT COMPANY

STRAT7 is a global data, insight, and strategy group built to give businesses a genuine commercial edge. We bring together seven specialist practices, each leaders in their field, united by shared technology, shared talent, and a single integrated model we call Collective Advantage. Operating across multiple industry verticals and twelve markets, our 300+ data scientists, insight consultants, and strategic advisors work as one connected team, with AI woven into every client engagement through Nucleus, our proprietary AI hub. The result is faster, sharper, more impactful work, and a partner that equips global brands with the strategies they need to navigate disruption and accelerate growth.

POSITION OVERVIEW

The Lead Cloud Platform Engineer is a senior role that takes ownership of the AWS platform architecture for STRAT7 products. Reporting directly to the Group CTO, the role holder will set and deliver the technical direction for our cloud infrastructure, working within the overall strategy set by the CTO and making the platform decisions needed to achieve it.

The role will focus predominantly on ex-plor, one of our core research products. ex-plor runs on AWS ECS and is undergoing significant change. We are looking for someone who can assess the current platform, bring fresh thinking to how it is hosted, deployed and operated, and lead the work to deliver it. This is not an embedded engineering role, but it does include hands-on operational work. Time will be split between running the platform and changing it, and the balance between the two will shift with immediate business requirements.

Our AI Lab platforms, including Nucleus, follow a serverless-first approach and are currently supported by a separate team. They share the same AWS estate, and the role holder will be expected to contribute to architecture decisions across those platforms as well.

As the team grows, the role holder will mentor and develop other engineers and help shape the platform team. Working within the Group technology function, the role collaborates closely with Development, Product, Client Services and other teams across the STRAT7 Group of companies.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Platform Architecture: Own the AWS platform architecture for ex-plor, including how client instances are provisioned, isolated, deployed and upgraded on ECS, and record key decisions as architecture decision records
• Platform Evolution: Assess the current ex-plor platform, propose a target architecture and lead its delivery while keeping clients running throughout
• Platform Operations: Run the ex-plor platform day to day, including production support, releases and incident response, and balance this with platform change as priorities require
• Infrastructure as Code: Design and build infrastructure in Terraform (HCL), establishing reusable modules and standards for use across product teams
• CI/CD & Release: Own the path from code merge to production, including pipeline design, secure authentication to AWS and safe, staged rollouts across the instance fleet
• Security & Compliance: Set and maintain the security baseline across the AWS estate, covering account structure, IAM, network design and secrets management, and support responses to client security reviews
• Reliability & Resilience: Define monitoring, alerting and recovery objectives, test disaster recovery, and establish incident and on-call processes that do not depend on any one individual
• Cost Management: Provide clear visibility of infrastructure cost by product and environment, and identify opportunities to reduce it
• Cross-Platform Input: Contribute to architecture decisions on the AI Lab's serverless platforms and help keep standards consistent across the estate
• Mentoring & Team Growth: Mentor and develop engineers joining the platform team, support the ex-plor development team on infrastructure matters, and contribute to future hiring
• Documentation: Maintain clear documentation of platform architecture, standards and operating procedures

SKILLS & ATTRIBUTES

Essential

Technical

• Significant experience designing, building and running production systems on AWS, including ownership of architecture decisions
• Advanced proficiency with Terraform (HCL), including structuring code for multi-account environments
• Strong experience running containerised workloads on AWS ECS (Fargate and/or EC2), including networking, scaling and deployment patterns
• Experience designing and running CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and applications
• Strong knowledge of AWS security, including IAM, AWS Organizations, SCPs, VPC design and services such as GuardDuty, Security Hub and Config
• Experience with observability tooling, incident management and disaster recovery planning
• Proficiency in Python or a similar language for automation and tooling
• Strong Git workflow knowledge and experience of code review

Non-technical

• Experience mentoring and developing engineers, and comfortable taking a lead role in growing a team
• Able to assess an existing platform objectively, set out clear options and make pragmatic decisions that balance technical quality with business priorities
• Communicates technical concepts clearly to developers, product managers, senior stakeholders and client security teams
• Takes full ownership of platform reliability and standards, and stays calm and focused under pressure
• Collaborates effectively across teams and locations
• Open to challenge and willing to change direction when the evidence supports it

Desirable

• Experience hosting and evolving an established web application, ideally Ruby on Rails with Amazon RDS
• Experience running multi-tenant or multi-instance SaaS platforms
• Experience with AWS serverless services such as Lambda, Step Functions and API Gateway
• AWS Professional or Specialty certifications
• Experience with platforms that host AI or data-intensive services
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code

BENEFITS

The role comes with a competitive up to Euros 70,200 Gross and clear paths to promotion and to new opportunities. Benefits include:

• Holiday allowance 21 days
• Increased holiday after 2 years of experience with the maximum of 5 days on the top
• Multi Sport cards
• Additional health insurance
• Regular social events

RECRUITMENT

There are two interviews and a task

DISCLOSURE

STRAT7 is an Equal Opportunity Employer and our employees are people with different strengths, experiences and backgrounds, who share a passion for research. Our commitment to inclusivity is not just about race and gender identity, but also age, disability status, sexual orientation, religion and many other parts of one's identity. All of our employee's points of view are key to our success, and inclusion is everyone's responsibility.