Senior Cloud & AI Platform Engineer

CreateFuture

Working at CreateFuture CreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference  while always putting people first. We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years. Our UK Benefits  * 35 days leave (including bank holidays).  * Private medical insurance. * Enhanced parental and adoption leave.  * Financial coaching + 5% pension match. * 40 hours of paid learning and development.  View our full list of UK benefits.  CreateFuture is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row. Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today. A hands-on senior engineer embedded in the client's platform team, responsible for the reliability, scalability, and evolution of their Kubernetes-based infrastructure on AWS. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and DevOps, owning the day-to-day health of containerised workloads while driving improvements to delivery pipelines, GitOps practices, and managed service configuration. The right candidate is comfortable working autonomously in a mature, opinionated stack and can influence without authority across engineering teams. Key Responsibilities * Own the operational health and evolution of containerised workloads running on EKS, including Helm chart management and Kustomize-based environment configuration * Drive GitOps practices using Flux, maintaining, improving, and troubleshooting the reconciliation pipeline across environments * Manage and optimise core managed services: EKS, MSK, and RDS, including scaling, patching, cost governance, and incident response * Maintain and extend infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, ensuring consistency, modularity, and alignment with AWS best practices * Support and improve GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows, including build, test, and deployment pipelines for containerised applications * Collaborate with development teams to support the hosting, debugging, and performance of Java/Kotlin and Python-based services * Identify and address platform-level technical debt, contributing to a roadmap of incremental improvements * Support on call for the EKS platform. Skills & Experience * Kubernetes at production scale, EKS preferred, with strong understanding of networking, RBAC, resource management, and cluster operations * GitOps tooling, Flux (essential), with solid working knowledge of Helm and Kustomize * AWS managed services, hands-on experience with EKS, MSK, and RDS in production environments * Terraform, authoring and maintaining modular infrastructure-as-code across multiple environments * GitHub Actions, building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for containerised workloads * Application-layer awareness, ability to support and troubleshoot Java/Kotlin and/or Python services running in containers * Strong operational mindset, comfortable with on-call responsibilities, incident management, and root cause analysis WHAT WE’LL OFFER YOU: We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look. OUR HIRING PROCESS We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. It usually looks like this: * Call with our Talent Acquisition Team  * Role specific capability interview  Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens. INCLUSION AT CREATEFUTURE  We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help. We look forward to your application!

CreateFuture

Working at CreateFuture CreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference  while always putting people first. We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years. CreateFuture is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row. Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today. About the role and team: At CreateFuture, the Senior Cloud Engineer is a vital individual contributor and a technical driving force within our delivery teams. You will work closely with clients and delivery teams to bridge the implementation gap, assisting with architectural designs and transforming them into production systems using autonomous and AI-native platforms. This role requires a modern, hybrid engineering approach, blending infrastructure mastery with software development and data engineering principles. You will act as a technical expert on projects, building trusted relationships with client stakeholders, establishing engineering best practices, and mentoring engineers within the Cloud capability. Furthermore, you will actively contribute to setting engineering standards that influence the whole CreateFuture organisation. Key Responsibilities TECHNICAL DELIVERY & IMPLEMENTATION * High-Quality Execution: Proactively contribute to project teams by providing technical guidance, resolving complex technical blockages, supporting migration efforts and writing high-quality, spec-driven code. * Platform Engineering: Build and maintain independent, self-service developer platforms that allow engineering teams to spin up compliant, ephemeral environments automatically using GitOps workflows. * AI & Agentic Infrastructure: Implement the data pipelines, workflow orchestrations, and specialised compute footprints needed to support enterprise AI applications, using technologies like AWS Bedrock and AWS AgentCore. * Observability & Reliability: Build robust monitoring and observability pipelines to ensure the health, performance, and security of distributed cloud applications and AI models. * FinOps Standards: Embed automated cost-estimation tools into the standard CI/CD deployment pipelines, ensuring auto-shutdown policies and resource optimisation are configured by default. CONSULTANCY & CLIENT ALIGNMENT * Client Advisory: Collaborate with diverse stakeholders, including tech leads, project managers, and enterprise architects, to ensure successful project delivery according to timelines and budgets. * Commercial Growth: Have a growth mindset on projects, recognising potential operational bottlenecks or new requirements, and own communicating these throughout the team for new opportunities. * Best Practice Champion: Establish best practice tools and processes within client environments, confidently challenging legacy ways of working where appropriate. CAPABILITY & LEADERSHIP SUPPORT * Mentoring: Support and mentor engineers within CreateFuture and our client teams, helping them navigate their learning and technical skill gaps. * Community Contribution: Actively engage in the internal engineering communities, helping to build out an internal repository of reference architectures, Infrastructure as Code templates, and technical blogs. * Culture and Feedback: Help foster an inclusive, collaborative, and psychologically safe team environment by providing timely, open, and honest technical feedback.   Skills & Experience CORE TECHNICAL CAPABILITIES Candidates must demonstrate a hybrid balance across the three strategic pillars: Software Engineering (30%), Infrastructure (40%), and Data Engineering (30%). * Infrastructure & Automation (40%): Lots of experience in writing declarative Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, container orchestration with Kubernetes (managing clusters, nodes, and pods), and building CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions. * Software & Agentic Engineering (30%): Proficiency with modern scripting languages for building custom AI agents, configuring workflow orchestration, connecting enterprise API integrations, and implementing agentic guardrails. * Data Engineering (30%): Practical experience implementing components of data pipelines, including real-time streaming tools (AWS Kinesis, Kafka), data orchestration (dbt, Airflow), and managing Vector Databases for RAG architectures. * Observability & Cost Management: SRE/Platform experience with the practical application of real-time monitoring and cloud cost optimisation using native CSP tools or utilities like Infracost and Karpenter. DOMAIN & SECTOR EXPERIENCE * Regulated Industries: Experience delivering secure platforms within highly regulated environments, such as iGaming, Financial Services, or banking, where Zero Trust security and strict compliance controls are mandatory, is highly advantageous. * Consulting: Proven experience operating in a client-facing or consulting engineering role, demonstrating strong communication skills, relationship-building capabilities, and adaptability across changing technical contexts. PREFERRED KNOWLEDGE-LEVEL & CERTIFICATIONS * Associate-level cloud certifications (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect Associate or Azure AZ-104). * At least 1 professional-level certification. * Progressing toward or holding multiple professional certifications such as CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator), AWS ML Engineer Associate, or FinOps Certified Practitioner.   WHAT WE’LL OFFER YOU: We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look. OUR HIRING PROCESS We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. It usually looks like this: * Call with our Talent Acquisition Team  * Role specific capability interview  Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens. INCLUSION AT CREATEFUTURE  We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help. We look forward to your application!

CreateFuture

Working at CreateFuture CreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference  while always putting people first. We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years. Our UK Benefits  * 35 days leave (including bank holidays).  * Private medical insurance. * Enhanced parental and adoption leave.  * Financial coaching + 5% pension match. * 40 hours of paid learning and development.  View our full list of UK benefits.  CreateFuture is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row. Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today.   About the role and team: At CreateFuture, our Lead Engineer - Cloud plays a pivotal role in supporting the success of our Cloud engineers, our clients, and internal projects. Working closely with clients, you are responsible for the successful delivery of client and internal projects by building professional relationships with key client stakeholders, challenging where appropriate. Use your technical expertise to provide best practice advice and processes within your project team and the wider capability. As our client demands expand from traditional cloud migrations to AI enablement and platform engineering, you will lead the charge in building autonomous platforms, managing AI lifecycles, and enforcing strict cost governance across cloud estates. You are seen as a leader internally and externally, through your technical expertise, guidance, and professionalism, both on and off a client. Alongside delivering for your customers, you will also support and mentor a team of cloud engineers to encourage their growth. You will be setting the technical direction of the team alongside Cloud Leads and Senior Engineers. Key responsibilities: CONSULTANCY & ADVISORY * Growth Mindset: Apply a growth mindset to identify new revenue opportunities on client accounts, working alongside the commercial team to successfully land additional work. * Pre-Sales Contribution: Lead and contribute to pre-sales activities, RFPs, and BIDs, accounting for up to 5% to 10% of the role. Engage with the commercial team to drive high-value Cloud and Data advisory roles. * Ambassadorial Presence: Act as an ambassador for CreateFuture in the public space, attending events, speaking, blogging, or leveraging social media to support the growth of the Cloud capability. * Hands-on: you are an experienced engineer and can be active with the cloud platform tools, software development and writing efficient code for clients.   TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP & PLATFORM SUPPORT * Technical Direction: Take responsibility for the technical direction and delivery of single or multiple client and internal project teams, acting as either a technical lead or a solo contributor. * AI-Native Infrastructure: Architect and implement the core engineering infrastructure required to run AI workloads reliably, moving client architectures from static data lakes to dynamic Vector Databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures. * Agentic Development: Build production-grade Agentic Workflows and custom AI agents, utilising advanced toolsets to bridge the widening market implementation gap. * Setting Development Best Practices: Define, promote, and establish best practice tools, security approaches, and common service patterns across the entire CreateFuture organisation. Ensure Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the organisational default and challenge inefficient legacy processes. * FinOps & Governance: Enforce strict automated security and cost controls, real-time cost-anomaly detection, and cost estimation into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) as a standard. Understanding of OpenTelemetry or other telemetry approaches. * Internal Platform Support: Assist the Capability Lead and architects in defining and delivering an internal collection of reusable components, reference architectures, and Proof of Concepts (PoCs). Supporting the internal IT function in helping other parts of the business use Cloud services. LEADING & MENTORING * Culture & Collaboration: Lead by example, creating a culture of open, honest feedback, collaboration, ownership, and accountability. * People Development: Create a psychologically safe environment for the team that enables them to grow by supporting their development journeys and career aspirations. * Capability Growth: Work alongside the Capability Lead and Director of Cloud and Data to identify missing or inconsistent skills within the department, supporting team members through tiered certification journeys. * Recruitment: Collaborate with Talent Acquisition through the recruitment process, including conducting interviews, candidate debriefs, and strategic decision-making to attract top talent. Skills & Experience CORE TECHNICAL CAPABILITIES Candidates must demonstrate a hybrid skillset, balancing Software Engineering (30%), Platform/SRE (40%), and Data Engineering (30%), with a core focus on Security, Governance, and Cost Management. * Cloud & Infrastructure (40%): Advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) via Terraform, advanced Kubernetes administration (clusters, nodes, pods), hardcore networking (VPC peering, Service Mesh, Zero Trust security), and solution architecture experience, with a cost-optimisation mindset. * Software Engineering, Agentic & AI Development (30%): Solid software engineer principles (pipelines, toolsets, testing, linting, vulnerability scanning, etc.) Production-level experience with tools such as Amazon Bedrock, AWS AgentCore, Azure AI Studio, LangChain, and writing automation scripts or custom AI agents using node or python. * Data Engineering (30%): Experience deploying and maintaining data orchestration toolsets (e.g., dbt, Apache Airflow), ETL/ELT methodologies, real-time streaming (e.g., AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka), Vector databases, and RAG architectures. * Observability & FinOps: Experience implementing modern observability tooling (OpenTelemetry) alongside automated cost-control systems (such as Karpenter, Infracost, OpenCost, or Cloud Custodian). DOMAIN & SECTOR EXPERIENCE * Regulated Industries: Experience working in highly regulated sectors such as Financial Services or iGaming is helpful, demonstrating an understanding of strict compliance, data privacy risks, and governance guardrails. * Consulting: Proven background in a client-facing consulting capacity, managing stakeholders, handling commercial realities, and meeting strict SLAs, timescales, and budgets. PREFERRED KNOWLEDGE-LEVEL & CERTIFICATIONS * Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). * Multiple professional-level certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or Azure Architect AZ-305.) * Beneficial for AWS GenAI Developer Professional, AWS ML Engineer Associate, or Azure AI Engineer Associate. * FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP). WHAT WE’LL OFFER YOU: We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look. OUR HIRING PROCESS We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. It usually looks like this: * Call with our Talent Acquisition Team  * Role specific capability interview  Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens. INCLUSION AT CREATEFUTURE  We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help. We look forward to your application!