Cloud Engineer/Architect (DevOps)

ION; London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 100,000

Job description

About us

The ION Group is made up of innovators who provide trading and workflow automation solutions, high-value analytics, and strategic consulting to corporations, financial institutions, central banks, and governments.

More than 40% of the world’s largest companies use our solutions. We’ve achieved tremendous growth by bringing together some of the best and most successful financial technology companies in the world.

At ION, we offer careers that provide many opportunities: To invent, design, collaborate, build, and transform businesses, empowering people around the world to do more, faster, and better than before. Imagine what you can do and experience. This is where you can do your best work.

Learn more at iongroup.com.

We are looking for people who are competent in the cloud, both in the engineering and architecture areas of the domain.

The team

The Core Architecture Team (CAT) produces and manages the core technology, methodologies, and frameworks that underpin all new or re-engineered ION products.

We provide our internal and external customers foundations and an open platform they can extend and evolve to manage their solutions independently and with reduced cost of ownership.

The ION Cloud Center of Excellence is aimed to support the Group's strategy toward a cloud-native offering via a cross-functional team responsible for developing and managing the strategy, governance, and best practices for the entire Group.

Some of the team deliverables:

1. Create the ION Cloud Infrastructure reusable by all the ION Divisions.
2. Reduce the total cost of ownership.
3. Provide guidelines and best practices for the entire organization.
4. Reduce operation complexity via automated platform configuration and deployment.
5. Provide tools that ease developers in setting up the CI environment for ION products.
6. Governance on development tools to increase operational efficiency.
7. Standardization of technology recommendations and infrastructure and product design across the Group.

Who you are

Your background is either in software development or operations/infrastructure (or both!), and you enjoy coding or automating your workflows.

You have proven experience in working with cloud providers and dealing with cloud-first applications engineered with a cloud-native mindset.

You are a self-starter individual and a constantly learning engineer who enjoys working in a team of peers.

You are open and candid about discussing solutions, problems, and improvements within your team and others in the engineering organization.

You advocate for DevOps or SRE approaches, promoting loosely coupled, heavily automated, constantly monitored distributed systems, and you always plan for failure and never take anything for granted.

You are keen to raise the bar of the solutions provided by the whole engineering team (Dev and Ops).

You possess strong written and verbal communication skills.

What you'll be doing

It’s fine to have some of these; the more, the merrier!

The cloud engineer side

1. Promote and execute the adoption of DevOps and Cloud Native principles and raise awareness of the importance of reliability and automation.
2. Help the team provide guidelines and blueprints on the DevOps lifecycle of applications.
3. Maintain our internal tooling and automation to improve the reliability, scalability, and observability of our services.
4. Proactively identify and solve issues across the whole stack, together with the rest of the infrastructure and engineering teams.
5. Contribute to raising awareness in the security and protection of the cloud, understanding how to fit these into timelines and the backlog of the end team.
6. Understand how a distributed application works, including constraints and limitations.
7. May have previous experience with software hosted in data centers and on at least one public cloud and be familiar with constraints and architectural choices.
8. Work to improve our automated delivery, enhancing our CI/CD solutions using automation tools to create/refactor deployment tools or pipelines (with SaaS solutions like GitHub).
9. Have strong coding and scripting experience and be interested in improving your programming knowledge (Python or Go ideally).

The cloud architect side

1. Create a state-of-the-art secure cloud architecture, supported by a robust and flexible infrastructure and platform with a reliable and efficient operating model.
2. Design and implement deployment, maintenance, monitoring, and management processes within the cloud strategy.
3. Design and support the Development team in creating new cloud-native applications while reviewing existing applications to migrate them to support the cloud architecture strategy.
4. Regularly evaluate the best cloud applications, capacity and size planning, and practices to keep the ION Cloud up to date with the best available in the industry.
5. Provide training and guidance to the rest of the organization, navigating them within the cloud journey.
6. Engage with Product Development teams to ensure cloud-native architecture becomes part of the standard design principles followed, supporting continuous integration and delivery models.
7. Maintain strong and continuous engagement with security experts internally and externally to ensure the ION Cloud architecture and operating model meet top security standards.
8. Work with stakeholders and C-level executives to agree on strategies to meet customers' needs and implement the cloud strategies accordingly.

Your skills, experience, and qualifications

These are must-haves!

1. Our work language is English; hence it’s very important to be proficient in it.
2. Extensive knowledge and experience in one of the major clouds, including AWS, Azure, or GCP, with a comprehensive understanding and real-world implementation experience (We currently use AWS and Azure).
3. Microservices in a cloud-native world: architecture, deployments, and engineering in the Kubernetes and Container space. You should be familiar with how to protect services and adhere to industry standards/best practices.
4. Understanding of network topologies, deployment methods, and constraints in the cloud.
5. Familiarity with application development methodologies in a cloud-native environment and container-based runtime.
6. Understanding of distributed systems is essential. You would benefit from having architectural concepts like SOA, object-oriented analysis and design, and/or client/server systems.
7. Experience working with diverse, remote, and distributed teams across multiple regions and time zones.
8. A proven track record as an engineer or architect and working in a consulting capacity directly with teams to educate and provide the best solution achievable within project constraints.
9. Cyber Security and operations awareness: understanding the basic principles (identity and access management, least privilege, encryption, etc.) and striving towards implementing best practices and education to establish a robust set of defenses in line with the company requirements.

Contract and locations

1. Contract Type: Full-time, permanent contract.
2. Locations: London, Milan, Pisa, Parma.

Important notes (Italy):

According to Italian Law (L.68/99), candidates from the disability list will be given priority.

Due to the high volume of applications, only those candidates that meet the required criteria for selection will be contacted.

If you’re from a non-EU country, you must have a valid EU visa or work permit.