AWS Cloud Engineer
Steadman & Chase
Contact person: Jake Cook
London, United Kingdom
Description
SENIOR CLOUD ENGINEER
London | 3-Month FTC | £100k-£120k Annualised
The OpportunityA London-based buy-side alternative investment fund operating in systematic and electronic FX trading is bringing on a Senior Cloud Engineer for a defined three-month engagement. The firm is migrating its core trading infrastructure to AWS and needs a senior hand to lead the build-out of a production-grade cloud environment from the ground up.
This is full ownership of the cloud stack with direct reporting into the Head of Product. The candidate joining will be the technical lead on every cloud-related decision for the duration of the engagement, working alongside an established development team on a platform that handles real money in live markets.
- Contract Type: Fixed-term contract of employment, paid directly by the hiring firm
- Duration: 3 calendar months from agreed start date
- Gross Salary: £25,000 to £30,000 over the 3-month term
- Annualised Equivalent: £100,000 to £120,000 per annum
- Payment: Monthly on the last working day of each month, paid directly into the candidate's bank account by the hiring firm. No umbrella, no agency intermediary
- Location: London, hybrid working with on-site presence required
- IR35: Outside scope, direct contract of employment with the hiring firm
- Pension: Auto-enrolment compliant from day one
- Holiday: 7 days pro-rated, paid in lieu if untaken
- Notice: Two weeks either side during the term
- Architecting and deploying AWS infrastructure to support a low-latency electronic FX trading platform, including VPC design, multi-AZ resilience, and direct connect or transit gateway configuration where the architecture requires it.
- Building and maintaining Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or equivalent, with all infrastructure committed to version control and deployed through CI/CD pipelines.
- Implementing security hardening to financial services standard, including IAM least-privilege design, KMS key management, VPC flow logging, GuardDuty, and CloudTrail audit configuration.
- Configuring the observability and monitoring stack covering CloudWatch, Prometheus and Grafana or equivalent, with alerting routed to the on-call rotation.
- Supporting the engineering team on containerisation and orchestration, with hands-on configuration of ECS, EKS, or equivalent as the architecture dictates.
- Documenting the deployed environment to a standard that allows clean handover to a permanent hire at the end of the engagement.
- Acting as the technical lead on all cloud-related decisions during the term, with direct reporting into the CTO.
- Minimum five years' commercial experience as a cloud engineer or cloud architect, with at least three years in AWS production environments.
- Demonstrable experience deploying and operating cloud infrastructure for a financial services, trading, or other latency-sensitive workload.
- Strong Terraform or equivalent IaC tooling, with examples of production deployments owned end to end.
- Hands-on experience of CI/CD pipeline design using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or equivalent.
- Working knowledge of Linux system administration, networking fundamentals (BGP, routing, TLS), and container orchestration.
- Right to work in the United Kingdom for the duration of the engagement. Visa sponsorship is not available for this fixed-term role.
- AWS certification at Solutions Architect Professional or Specialty level.
- Prior experience supporting an electronic FX, equities, or futures trading platform.
- Exposure to FIX protocol, market data infrastructure, or order management systems.
- Experience with kdb+/q, OpenOnload, or other low-latency tooling.
Most three-month engagements in this space go through umbrella companies or agency payroll on inside-IR35 day rates. This one does not. The candidate is hired directly by the firm on a fixed-term contract of employment, paid directly into the candidate's own account by the firm itself. No umbrella deductions, no agency margin sitting between the candidate and the salary, no IR35 ambiguity. The annualised equivalent of £100k to £120k puts this firmly above the day-rate market for inside-IR35 cloud engineers, and the scope of work is full architectural ownership rather than ticket-driven delivery.