Job Description
Cloud Operations Lead to join our growing IT team based in the A&O Shearman Belfast office.
The core of the global technology department's mission is to provide stable, reliable, and secure platforms and services to our partners, staff and clients and fulfil our regulatory obligations across 30+ countries. To ensure that a consistent and standardized IT service is delivered to all offices, IT is managed and led as a global function, enabling all offices to benefit from complete systems integration and economies of scale. We have around 500 technologists based predominantly in the UK, Singapore and increasingly in the US.
The Team - Technology Services
Deliver performant, available and consistent technology services by operating the firm's core systems and providing world-class support across all regions and offices to enable frictionless user experiences.
We are seeking a Cloud Operations Lead. You will manage a team of highly skilled, multi-disciplined Service Reliability Engineering (SRE) engineers. You will be responsible for maintaining and supporting the firm's cloud platform, which runs many of the firm's core business systems. You will lead your team in supporting and enhancing the application stack along with the associated services. You will manage deployments, infrastructure-as-code and the health and posture of our tenant, ensuring it is available, reliable, performant and secure. You will achieve this by establishing and maintaining strong working relationships with landing zone owners, platform engineering, and third parties. You will play a key role in building and managing a significant operating budget for the cloud platform.
Reporting to the Head of Infrastructure and Operations, you will work alongside all other operational teams and colleagues across the IT global team to provide first class support to our internal customers. You will have a key role to play in the transformation of our cloud roadmap and associated deliverables, which continues to be a high focus for the firm.
What you will do
* Lead the cloud operations teams, including engineers, support teams, third parties along with Microsoft account team.
* Define the cloud infrastructure operations responsibilities and roadmap, whilst aligning them with business goals.
* Ensure cloud systems and applications meet availability, performance and reliability requirements.
* Ensure cloud systems adhere to regulatory, security, and governance standards.
* Manage cloud usage, builds and maintains cloud operating budgets, develops and implements cost-management strategies.
* Evaluate and implement new cloud technologies to better serve business needs.
* Lead major incident response and ensure quick service restoration.
* Work closely with platform engineering, architecture, security, and business teams.
What you will have
* Minimum 10 years' experience in a role supporting IT cloud infrastructure and operations.
* Lead and mentor cloud engineers, SREs, and operations staff whilst building a culture of accountability, reliability, and continuous improvement.
* Demonstrated ability to run a 24/7 cloud operation team, including On-Call and incident response.
* Demonstrable experience of managing high-severity incidents to resolution, carrying out root cause analysis, implementing preventive measures and resilience strategies.
* Strong understanding of cloud consumption cost and implementing FinOps best practices.
* Experience developing strong partnership with InfoSec teams to ensure data protection and compliance. This will entail conducting risk assessments and implement security best practices.
* Demonstrate experience in enforcing cloud operational policies, processes, and SLAs. Establish ITIL-based practices for incident, problem, change, and capacity management.
* Tenacious in delivering outcomes for the business - not afraid to take ownership of issues and drive them to resolution. Has a "can do" attitude.
* Excellent people management skills - performance management, staff development, coaching.
* Proven skills to standardise and streamline operational processes across multiple technology stacks.
Desirable
* Proven experience in cloud-native tooling (microservices, serverless, containers, Kubernetes).
* Familiarity with emerging cloud technologies (AI workloads, edge computing, quantum cloud services).
* Certifications in either AWS, GCP or Azure.
A&O Shearman is a global industry-leading law firm, with nearly 50 offices in 28 countries worldwide. Our fluency in English law, US law, and the laws of the world's most dynamic markets, enables us to provide unmatched insight and seamless delivery to clients. We work on challenging and important deals and disputes that have the potential to shape the future.
We offer exceptional opportunities for our people; opportunities to work for the world's leading businesses; to transform the status quo, and to deliver your best work, helping you and your career to thrive, while delivering unparalleled outcomes for our clients.
Whether you're helping clients solve complex challenges, transforming the ways we manage our business, or ensuring the smooth running of our operations, this is an environment where you can belong and excel. We provide first-rate training and development; we are committed to an inclusive environment, and we provide support and ways of working that help you optimize your wellbeing.
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