Next plc
Senior Cloud Engineer - AI Platform
AI and ML · ~6+ yrs (est.)
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Opened
- 13 Oct 26
- Closes
- No date listed
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Does Next plc sponsor UK visas? Licence and open rolesAbout the role
The Role:
As a Senior Cloud Engineer for the AI Platform, you will be heavily involved in designing, building, and maintaining the underlying platform infrastructure that enables the business to develop, deploy, and scale autonomous AI agents and workloads. You will collaborate with architects, security teams, and business stakeholders to engineer and manage a scalable, reliable, and highly secure foundation across Microsoft Azure and GCP, delivering standard templates, robust pipelines, and platform guardrails that accelerate innovation while ensuring governance and production-readiness. In addition, as a senior engineer, you are expected to support and mentor junior team members through code review, lead technical workshops, and endorse cloud best practices.
You will be a key driver in delivering the foundational platform capabilities (including vector datastores, identity and access controls, MCP integrations, and FinOps) and acting as a gate for the productionisation of proven PoCs.
Your responsibilities will extend to implementing observability, token tracing, prompt injection defense, and built-in guardrails to proactively resolve issues, ensuring all infrastructure adheres to zero-trust security best practices, and managing platform stability and availability.
You will act as a crucial point of escalation, mentor junior team members, and take a lead role in coordinating the resolution of major issues. You will also participate in incident response, disaster recovery efforts, and work closely with other technology teams to establish a secure, enterprise-grade AI launchpad that eliminates shadow IT and speeds up time-to-production for new business solutions.
What You’ll Take On:
You are an experienced and proactive engineer with a deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, networking architecture, automation, and security tailored for AI platforms and workloads. You are confident in scoping, designing, and planning large, complex projects, translating business requirements into robust, secure, and pragmatic technical solutions. You excel at managing stakeholder expectations and communicating clearly with senior management.
As a senior figure, you are a natural mentor, capable of coaching junior team members, developing standards, and acting as a subject matter expert for cloud and AI infrastructure.
What You’ll Bring:
Azure Foundations, Scaffolding & Landing Zones (Cloud Governance, AI Guardrails & Best Practice)
Azure Container Apps, AKS, and Container Registries
Vector Datastores, Secure Storage Encryption, and AI Memory Infrastructure
Agent Identity Management, EntraID, RBAC, and Zero-Trust Access Controls
Model Evaluations & Security Controls (Prompt Injection Defense, Guardrails)
AI Observability, Token Tracing and FinOps / Cost Controls
Model Context Protocol (MCP) Integrations & Tooling Pipelines
Terraform, Ansible, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Module Development
Azure DevOps (CI/CD, Security, Pipeline Automation)
Azure Networking (Express Route, Virtual Networks, ASG / NSG, Azure Firewall, DNS)
APIM
Automation & Scripting
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
#LI-LE1 #LI-Hybrid
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