Lead Cloud Engineer (AWS)

Job description: Sign-on Bonus: Eligible for candidates who are currently employed elsewhere and able to join GFT within 30 days of offer acceptance. Role Summary  We are seeking an experienced Lead Cloud Engineer (7–10 years) with deep expertise in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive the design, implementation, and governance of cloud-native infrastructure for our banking clients. This role requires both hands-on technical capability and leadership skills to guide engineering teams, ensure architectural best practices, and deliver scalable, secure, and compliant solutions. You will partner closely with delivery managers, architects, and product teams to set the direction for cloud adoption and modernization initiatives.   Key Responsibilities  Technical Leadership: Provide architectural direction and technical leadership across multiple product teams building on AWS.  Cloud Strategy & Roadmap: Define and evolve cloud strategy, ensuring alignment with business goals, regulatory requirements, and security standards.  Architecture Ownership: Own the end-to-end architecture of AWS-based infrastructure, including networking, compute, storage, and security models.  Mentorship & Governance: Mentor Cloud Engineers (L3/L4) and establish best practices for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), CI/CD, monitoring, and cloud security.  Complex Migrations: Lead large-scale cloud migration initiatives (on-prem to AWS) ensuring minimal downtime and full compliance.  Stakeholder Management: Collaborate with Delivery, Security, and Product stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical designs.  Innovation & Tooling: Evaluate emerging AWS services and DevOps tools, driving adoption of solutions that reduce operational toil and improve delivery velocity.  Service Reliability: Define and enforce SLOs/SLIs for cloud infrastructure, ensuring resilience, performance, and observability.  Compliance & Security: Drive adherence to security standards (PCI-DSS, ISO, SOC2) and ensure proper IAM governance, encryption, and audit readiness.  Incident Leadership: Provide escalation support for critical production issues, leading root cause analysis and continuous improvement actions.    Required Skills & Experience AWS Mastery: 7–10 years in cloud engineering, with deep hands-on expertise across core AWS services (EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS/Aurora, S3, IAM, VPC, Lambda, CloudFormation/Terraform).  Architectural Design: Proven ability to design large-scale, multi-account AWS architectures for regulated industries (preferably banking/financial services).  Leadership: Minimum 3 years in a senior/lead role, mentoring teams and driving governance across multiple squads.  Automation & IaC: Advanced experience with Terraform or AWS CloudFormation. Strong background in building modular, reusable infrastructure components.  DevOps & CI/CD: Experience setting up enterprise-grade pipelines (AWS CodePipeline, GitLab, Jenkins) for continuous integration and delivery.  Security & Compliance: Strong knowledge of cloud security practices, IAM policy design, encryption, audit, and compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS, ISO 27001).  Resilience & Performance: Expertise in architecting for scalability, availability (multi-region/multi-AZ), disaster recovery, and fault tolerance.  Collaboration & Communication: Strong ability to engage stakeholders, present technical strategies, and influence decision-making at senior levels.  Nice-to-Have  Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional.  Observability: Experience implementing advanced monitoring/logging (CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).  Messaging Systems: Experience with Kafka or AWS-native equivalents (Kinesis, MSK).  Multi-cloud Awareness: Understanding of other platforms (Azure, GCP) while maintaining AWS specialization.  Software Development Background: Familiarity with application development (Java, Python) for effective collaboration with dev teams.    Due to the high volume of applications we receive, we are unable to respond to every candidate individually. If you have not received a response from GFT regarding your application within 10 workdays, please consider that we have decided to proceed with other candidates. We truly appreciate your interest in GFT and thank you for your understanding.