Acumen Bay Consultancy

Role: Multi-Cloud Architect & DevOps Platform Engineer

Minimum Experience: 18-20 years minimum in Cloud Architecture and DevOps

Location / Pattern: London / Hybrid

Engagement: Permanent

Compensation: £45k to 55k per annum

Hiring Organisation: Acumen Bay Consultancy Limited

Mandatory requirements — non-negotiable

We are deliberately specific here to save everyone's time.

1. Tri-cloud, hands-on. Production delivery experience on all three of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Depth in at least two and working competence in the third. Certification alone will not evidence this — we will discuss real designs you have shipped.

2. DevOps pipeline engineering. You have designed and owned enterprise CI/CD platforms, not merely consumed them. Demonstrable experience leading at least one large-scale pipeline migration or Pipeline-as-Code framework rollout across multiple teams.

3. Industry experience — pharma, telecom and banking. Delivery experience across all three regulated sectors: pharmaceutical / life sciences, telecommunications, and financial services / banking. You understand why change control, validation and audit trails exist, and you design for them from the outset.

4. Infrastructure as Code mastery. Terraform to module-authoring and testing standard, plus at least one of Ansible, Chef, Bicep or ARM.

5. Kubernetes in production. Managed (GKE / AKS / EKS) and ideally on-premises, including networking, storage, ingress and upgrade strategy.

6. Cloud security depth. IAM, network design, certificate and secrets management, and DevSecOps tooling within a regulated estate.

7. Automation scripting. Strong Python, plus Bash and PowerShell. Groovy or Ruby welcome.

8. Observability and SRE practice. Ownership of reliability, availability and performance for production platforms, with the incident and postmortem history to evidence it.

9. Architecture communication. You can produce HLD/LLD, defend a design at an architecture review board, and write documentation people actually use.

• GenAI / RAG platform infrastructure — GPU-enabled Kubernetes, embedding and orchestration services, vector stores.
• Istio, OpenShift and Databricks.
• ServiceNow CMDB and change integration into automated pipelines.
• IBM middleware estate experience (WebSphere, MQ, ACE) for legacy-to-cloud migration work.
• Consulting or client-facing delivery background.

Certifications — any combination welcome

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or DevOps Engineer – Professional.
• Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect or Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer.
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) or Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104).
• HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate.
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Application Developer (CKAD).

Architecture & Design

• Translate business and value-stream requirements into HLD/LLD and architecture blueprints across GCP, Azure and AWS.
• Define on-premises to cloud migration strategy — assessment, wave planning, target-state design, cutover and rollback.
• Apply architecture patterns with intent: hub-and-spoke, microservices, event-driven, hybrid and multi-cloud.
• Design cloud security and networking — IAM, VPC and VPC Service Controls, Workload Identity Federation, private connectivity, segmentation.
• Engage stakeholders directly across architecture, security, network, risk, vendor and delivery teams.
• Evaluate emerging technology (GenAI / LLM platforms, MLOps tooling) for enterprise adoption and produce the recommendation, not just the demo.

Infrastructure as Code

• Build reusable, versioned Terraform modules with unit and integration tests (Chef InSpec or equivalent) — modules other teams can consume without hand-holding.
• Terragrunt, Ansible, Chef / Chef Automate, ARM Templates, Azure Bicep and Packer.
• GitOps workflows and Policy as Code — drift detection, guardrails and automated compliance evidence.

DevOps Pipeline Engineering — the core of this role

• Design, build and modernise enterprise CI/CD estates: Jenkins (shared libraries), GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Harness, UrbanCode Deploy, TeamCity, Bamboo and Rundeck.
• Lead pipeline migrations end to end (for example ADO / UrbanCode Deploy to Harness) — target build and deploy architecture, agents and delegates, networking, certificates, environments and team onboarding.
• Deliver GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux, release engineering discipline, and DevSecOps gates (SAST / SCA / DAST, OWASP ZAP) embedded in the pipeline rather than bolted on afterwards.
• Establish Pipeline-as-Code frameworks that standardise delivery across many application teams and cut onboarding time.

Containers & Orchestration

• Kubernetes at production scale — GKE, AKS, EKS, on-premises and GPU-enabled clusters.
• Docker, Helm, Kustomize, Ingress NGINX, Istio service mesh and OpenShift familiarity.
• Harbor, Nexus, Artifactory, image scanning and software supply-chain integrity.

Security & Compliance

• HSM-backed key management (nCipher or equivalent) for TLS and code signing.
• Certificate lifecycle automation — CSR to Venafi to Keyfactor to deployment, with expiry risk designed out.
• Binary Authorization, Linux security baselines and secrets management (Secret Manager, Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault).
• Deliver against banking-grade, GxP and telecom regulatory expectations with audit evidence that stands up to scrutiny.

Observability & SRE

• Dynatrace, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK and OpenTelemetry.
• SLI / SLO / error budgets, dashboards and alerting, runbooks, incident response and blameless postmortems.
• High-availability and disaster recovery design, backup and restore automation, and tested recovery — not merely documented recovery.

Data & AI Platforms

• CloudSQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server), Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis.
• Vector databases (Milvus or equivalent), LLM / RAG platform infrastructure, and MLOps / LLMOps platform engineering.

Pay: £45,000.00-£55,000.00 per year

Work Location: In person