Head of Cloud & Platform Engineering

Head of Cloud & Platform EngineeringPermanentDublin, HybridMy client, a leading financial technology organisation, is on the lookout for a Head of Cloud & Platform Engineering to join their team. This is a hands-on senior leadership role focused on AWS cloud architecture, platform engineering, Kubernetes, IaC, SRE, security and AI infrastructure, with a hybrid working model requiring three days per week onsite in Dublin.The Job: Lead and mentor a distributed SRE/Platform Engineering team, remaining hands-on with architecture and technical direction.Design and own highly available, scalable, resilient multi-region AWS infrastructure and distributed systems.Build reusable Infrastructure-as-Code, self-service platforms and secure paved-road infrastructure for engineering teams.Establish SRE practices covering observability, telemetry, SLOs, incident response, RCA, post-incident reviews and self-healing automation.Own cloud security, threat detection, governance and compliance, embedding automated controls and guardrails into infrastructure.Build and operate infrastructure supporting AI/ML and LLM workloads, including model serving, APIs and orchestration.Drive cloud cost optimisation and FinOps while balancing performance, security and reliability.Set technical standards across engineering and lead architecture, design reviews, documentation and platform strategy.Drive automation, standardisation and developer self-service, reducing operational overhead and improving engineering efficiency.Work closely with engineering, architecture, security and senior stakeholders to deliver technical strategy and operational excellence.Have you: 8+ years' experience in Cloud, Platform, SRE, DevOps or Infrastructure Engineering, with strong technical leadership experience.Deep hands-on AWS experience, including EKS/ECS, IAM, VPC/networking, CloudFront, Lambda, RDS/DynamoDB and multi-region architecture.Strong production Kubernetes/EKS experience at scale.Strong Terraform/OpenTofu and Infrastructure-as-Code experience, including reusable modules and self-service infrastructure.Strong knowledge of Linux, TCP/IP, DNS, routing, networking, performance tuning and distributed systems.Proven experience leading SRE, Platform or Infrastructure teams, including distributed/international teams.Strong observability and SRE experience across monitoring, alerting, tracing, SLOs, incident management and RCA.Experience with cloud security, threat detection and compliance, ideally SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001.Strong Python, Go or Bash skills for platform tooling, automation and remediation, plus CI/CD experience.Exposure to AI/ML/LLM infrastructure, including model hosting, vector databases, API gateways and orchestration, alongside FinOps/cloud cost optimisation.Berkley Business & Technology is a specialist consultancy, recruiting professionals for organizations throughout Ireland, UK & Europe; for more information go to www.berkley-group.com. If you would like to discuss this vacancy further or to discuss your career options in confidence, please send your profile to owanszaft@berkley-group.com