Our client is a technology, innovation, and consumer intelligence firm that advises global leaders on emerging science, technology, and market trends to drive smarter, more confident innovation decisions. They combine proprietary research, primary data from startups and industry experts, and advanced analytical frameworks to help organizations identify high-value opportunities, mitigate risk, and accelerate growth. By integrating human expertise with AI-enabled tools, they deliver objective, evidence-based insights that translate complex technological and consumer signals into actionable strategies for R&D, corporate innovation, and executive decision-making. They serve many of the world's largest technology and consumer goods companies.

Position Overview

This is a senior, hands-on DevOps role for an engineer who wants to take ownership of a real, complex cloud estate and make it modern, secure, and reliable. Our client runs primarily on AWS, with a separate legacy Azure estate from an acquisition that they intend to deprecate and consolidate into AWS. You will own that infrastructure end to end, drive the consolidation and hardening roadmap, and build the automation, security, and reliability foundation the rest of engineering depends on.

You will report directly to the CTO as the company's dedicated infrastructure owner. This is a high-autonomy role for someone who is energized, not daunted, by a legacy environment that needs real work: you will set the priorities, make the calls, and turn a fragile, internet-exposed estate into a well-architected foundation.

Responsibilities

• Own and operate cloud infrastructure across AWS (primary) and the legacy Azure estate, including compute, networking, data services, and cost
• Be the dedicated point of accountability for reliability, security posture, and operational health of the estate
• Lead the deprecation of the legacy Azure estate and its consolidation into AWS, migrating what is needed and retiring the rest
• Drive AWS toward a coherent, well-architected target and execute migrations of legacy workloads with minimal disruption
• Drive the estate to private-by-default networking and a hardened posture
• Own identity and access: SSO, MFA, least-privilege roles, and workload identity (OIDC) over long-lived credentials
• Stand up centralized secrets management and rotation
• Build toward SOC 2-aligned controls and audit-readiness, establishing the practices even if formal certification is not an immediate goal
• Build and standardize infrastructure-as-code so the estate is reproducible and reviewable
• Build and own CI/CD pipelines so releases are fast, safe, and repeatable
• Modernize telemetry and observability across the estate: metrics, logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, and actionable alerting
• Eliminate single points of failure; implement backups, disaster recovery, and resilient, multi-AZ architectures; own incident response
• Manage cloud cost and governance, driving down waste and improving visibility

Qualifications

• 7+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or cloud engineering, with deep hands-on operational experience
• Deep AWS expertise (compute and containers such as ECS/Fargate, VPC and networking, IAM, RDS, S3). Azure proficiency is not required, just enough familiarity to lead the deprecation and migration into AWS
• Strong infrastructure-as-code (Terraform / OpenTofu), CI/CD, containers, Linux, scripting (Python, Bash), and modern observability tooling
• Demonstrated experience migrating, consolidating, or modernizing complex legacy cloud environments
• Strong cloud security background: network segmentation, identity and access management, secrets management, encryption, and hardening internet-exposed systems
• Comfortable planning and executing change in brownfield estates where you cannot start from a clean slate
• Familiarity with SOC 2 (or similar) controls and the operational practices to build toward them
• Able to operate as an autonomous sole owner of a cloud estate, setting and driving a remediation roadmap with limited oversight
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

What Success Looks Like

• A servant leader who leads by example and gives credit to others
• Pragmatic and outcome-focused: bold about improving things, but right-sizes solutions instead of over-engineering them
• Takes ownership and creates order in ambiguity, staying calm and methodical under pressure
• Wants to turn a complex estate into a secure, reliable foundation for something larger than themselves