Cloud Platform Engineer (Site Reliability and Observability)

Salary: £60,000 - £72,000 per annum

Employment type: Permanent

Hours per week: 37

Reporting into: Lead Platform Engineer

Department: IT

Click here to read the full job description and view our excellent benefits here

This role operates primarily on a remote working arrangement that will require little to no travel into our Coventry head office or various campuses. Our working model arrangements are a non-contractual benefit so please note that an Arden work location is added to our employment contracts.

About Arden University:

We are an aspirational and multi-award-winning university, delivering rapid growth with ambitious plans to disrupt the HE sector through our passion for innovation and digital education. Our vision is to become the first-choice university for career-focused lifelong learners worldwide, ensuring that everyone, everywhere can access higher education, by leading the thoughtful integration of AI into teaching and learning and equipping our students to thrive in an AI-enabled world.

There has never been a more exciting time to join Arden University, as we expand into new disciplines, forge worldwide partnerships, and expand our locations..

About our Department:

The Cloud Platform Engineer (Site Reliability and Observability) sits within our Technology Department that is crucial to making sure our employees and students can work effectively, deliver projects, find the right solutions and ensure we develop the technology that will make the biggest difference.

Our IT team is made up of around 100 employees with a vast range of skills from Software Development to IT Operations and Security.

Our IT Department values employee development and we have lots of great examples of employee progression and promotions within the team.

About the Opportunity:

As a Cloud Platform Engineer (Reliability & Observability) at Arden University, you will play a key role in building and operating the cloud platforms that underpin our digital services. Working across AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, you will help deliver secure, scalable and cost-effective infrastructure, strengthen automation and improve the tools and capabilities that enable our engineering teams to deliver reliable services.

You will also help shape how we embed Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across our Cloud Platform team, making services more observable, resilient and easier to support. From developing meaningful monitoring and alerting to improving incident response, validating recovery processes and automating repetitive tasks, you will turn operational insights into practical improvements that make a real difference.

Working closely with cloud engineering, security, service management and application teams, you will help build a culture of reliability, continuous improvement and shared ownership. This is an opportunity to combine hands-on cloud engineering with the development of emerging SRE practices, helping strengthen the foundations of Arden’s technology and support our continued digital transformation.

About You:

Essential Skills Experience:

• Substantial experience building, supporting and improving production cloud infrastructure and platform services across AWS, Google Cloud or Azure.

• Practical experience operating Kubernetes or equivalent container platforms, including deployments, networking, storage, workload health and troubleshooting.

• Strong skills in Terraform, reusable Infrastructure as Code modules, Git and CI/CD pipelines, with experience delivering controlled, versioned and peer-reviewed infrastructure changes.

• Proficiency in Bash or Python automation, alongside practical knowledge of Linux, IP networking, DNS, identity and access management, secrets management and least-privilege security.

• Experience implementing observability through metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, actionable alerting and service-health reporting.

• Understanding of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, including service-level indicators and objectives (SLIs/SLOs), availability, capacity planning and reducing recurring failures.

• Experience investigating production incidents, conducting root-cause analysis and implementing preventative measures or automated remediation.

• Experience with backup and restore, disaster recovery and resilience testing, including validating recovery procedures.

• Experience developing operational runbooks and following established service management and support processes..

Desirable Skills / Experience:

• Relevant certifications in AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

• Experience operating across multiple cloud providers, particularly AWS and Google Cloud, including cloud networking, identity, compute, container platforms and monitoring.

• Familiarity with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus and Loki, or equivalent technologies.

• Knowledge of SRE practices, including error budgets, incident reviews, operational readiness and reducing repetitive operational work.

• Experience with Kubernetes cluster upgrades, scaling, node health, storage management and disaster recovery.

• Understanding of cloud cost optimisation, including cost allocation, budgets, resource tagging and right-sizing.

• Experience with cloud landing zones, project onboarding, platform handover, developer self-service or policy-as-code.

• Exposure to production data, integration, generative AI or Agentic AI platforms, including operational telemetry, secure service connectivity and managed agent runtimes.

Why Arden:

At Arden, you will become a part of a passionate and dedicated team who are committed to removing unnecessary barriers to learning and making education more accessible. Our people work hard to ensure our students journeys are the best they can possibly be, as such we want to reward our people with fantastic benefits. Employees benefit from:

• 30 days holiday + bank holidays on-top, and even a Christmas closure!

• A generous Aviva pension plan, company contributions starting from 7%

• BUPA Cash Plan

• Private Medical Insurance coverage (applies to certain job roles)

• Access to Perkbox benefits

• Study any Arden course for free, with a discount for all family and friends

• Plus, other excellent benefits

• Our ‘Golden Ticket’ which allows you to gift anyone in your life a free Arden education

Our Values:

Stand out, Progressive, Accessible, Resourceful, Kindness, reflect who we are as an institution, a team and as individuals. If they also reflect you and you are excited by the chance to be the driving, creative force within a growing business, we want to hear from you.

There has never been a more exciting time to join Arden University, as we expand into new disciplines and locations.

Closing Date: 5th November

We reserve the right to close this vacancy before the specified closing date should we receive sufficient applications or in order to respond to business needs. In order to avoid missing an opportunity to apply please submit your application as early as possible.

If you are a current Arden student or have an upcoming course with us, you are not eligible to apply for Student Experience roles due to a conflict of interest related to system access.

Equity, Diversity & Inclusion:

Arden University is proud to be a Disability Confident Employer. This means that if you have a disability, as defined by the Disability Equality Act 2010, you may be guaranteed an interview if you meet the essential criteria for the role.

If you wish to be considered under this scheme, you can indicate via the application form below. By doing so, you are also consenting for this information to be shared with the hiring team. For more details on what qualifies as a disability under the Disability Equality Act 2010, please refer to the guidance here.

As an Equal Opportunity Employer we celebrate diversity and are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. Therefore, we make sure that our recruitment and selection processes never discriminate based upon people's age, disability, gender, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, sexual orientation, or other personal circumstances, and actively welcome applications from all groups.

Sponsorship statement:

Please be aware that some roles may not meet the points requirement for a sponsored Skilled Worker visa, or fulfil the criteria we have for providing sponsorship.  However we welcome applications from candidates who do not currently have the right to work in the UK but may be eligible for a visa through an alternative route.