Principal Cloud Operations Engineer

Job Description: Principal Cloud Operations Engineer

Location: Hybrid

Department: IT Operations

Type: Full-time, Permanent

At Laya Healthcare, we are committed to delivering reliable, secure, and high-performing digital services that support our members, employees, and business operations. Our IT Operations team plays a critical role in enabling this by managing and evolving our technology platforms, ensuring resilience, scalability, and innovation across the organisation.

As we continue to strengthen and mature our cloud platform, we are now hiring a Principal Cloud Operations Engineer — a senior technical leadership role responsible for the technical operation, governance, and continuous improvement of our enterprise cloud environment, with a primary focus on Microsoft Azure.

This is a unique opportunity to take ownership of cloud operations at scale, influence platform strategy, and ensure our cloud environment is secure, resilient, and optimised to support business-critical services.

About the Role

The Principal Cloud Operations Engineer is a senior technical expert responsible for owning and operating the cloud platform, ensuring reliability, observability, governance, and continuous optimisation. Unlike traditional engineering roles, this position is focused on cloud platform operations rather than application delivery pipelines.

You will provide technical leadership, drive operational excellence, and collaborate across teams to ensure cloud services are scalable, secure, and aligned with organisational needs.

This role requires deep technical expertise, strong ownership mindset, and the ability to influence stakeholders while remaining hands-on in critical operational areas.

What You’ll Be Doing

Operational Excellence

• Own all technical aspects of cloud operations, monitoring, and incident response
• Implement observability using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights
• Improve system reliability through SRE and DevOps practices

Azure Platform Leadership

• Own and evolve Azure landing zones, subscriptions, and management groups
• Enforce governance using Azure Policy, RBAC, and best practice frameworks
• Drive platform performance, scalability, and reliability

Cloud Architecture \& Engineering

• Contribute to and guide the design of Azure-native platforms (IaaS, PaaS, serverless)
• Maintain cloud reference architectures, standards, and best practices
• Support delivery of secure, resilient, enterprise-scale cloud systems

Security \& Compliance

• Embed security-by-design principles across the cloud platform
• Implement controls such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Key Vault, and managed identities
• Ensure compliance with regulatory and data protection requirements

Cost Management \& Optimisation

• Monitor and optimise cloud consumption for cost efficiency
• Implement FinOps practices, budgeting, and governance controls
• Provide guidance on cost-effective platform design

Infrastructure as Code \& Automation

• Champion Infrastructure as Code using Bicep, ARM, and Terraform
• Increase automation to reduce manual intervention and improve consistency
• Support the transition of existing services to infrastructure-as-code where appropriate

Leadership \& Collaboration

• Act as a senior technical authority for cloud operations decisions
• Mentor Cloud and DevOps Engineers
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams
• Provide operational guidance to DevOps teams

Multi-Cloud Awareness

• Maintain working knowledge of AWS to support hybrid cloud environments
• Provide guidance on Azure vs AWS trade-offs where needed

About You

Essential

• 4–6+ years’ experience in cloud or infrastructure roles, including senior-level experience
• Strong expertise in Microsoft Azure, particularly in operating and managing cloud platforms
• Deep understanding of networking, identity (Entra ID), compute, and storage services
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, automation, and CI/CD
• Strong problem-solving skills with experience managing incidents and root cause analysis
• Hands-on experience with Linux and/or Windows environments
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence stakeholders

Desirable

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (or equivalent)
• Terraform or similar IaC certification
• Experience with containerisation and orchestration (Docker, AKS, Helm)
• Familiarity with AWS in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment
• Experience designing and operating enterprise-scale cloud platforms

Why Join Laya Healthcare?

At Laya, taking care of our people is just as important as taking care of our members.

You’ll enjoy:

• Health insurance from day one
• Hybrid working options
• Competitive salary and annual bonus
• Pension contributions
• Generous maternity, paternity \& adoptive leave
• Continuous learning \& career development
• Access to wellbeing programmes and onsite gym facilities (where applicable)
• A culture that values innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement If you’re passionate about cloud operations and platform excellence and want to play a key role in running and evolving a secure, scalable, and high-performing cloud environment, we’d love to hear from you.

Apply today and help us power the future of cloud at Laya Healthcare.