Location: Watford, England, United Kingdom
We are Allwyn UK, part of the Allwyn Entertainment Group – a multi-national lottery operator with a market-leading presence in Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Cyprus and Italy. We have been officially awarded the Fourth Licence (10-year licence) to operate the National Lottery starting February 2024.
We’ve developed ground-breaking technologies, built player protection frameworks, and have a proven track record of making lotteries better. Our aim is to create one of the UK’s most inclusive organisations – where people can bring the best of themselves, to do their best work, every day, for the benefit of good causes.
While the main contribution of the National Lottery to society is through the funds to good causes, at Allwyn we put our purpose and values at the heart of everything we do. Join us as we embark on a once-in-a-lifetime, large-scale transformation journey to build a bigger, better, and safer National Lottery that delivers more money to good causes.
Read on to fully understand what this job requires in terms of skills and experience If you are a good match, make an application.
Role Purpose:
As the Head of Cloud, you will lead and manage the Cloud Centre of Excellence multi-skilled and multi-Cloud platform engineering team to deliver high-quality, scalable, and innovative cloud solutions in a heavily regulated environment. You will be responsible for setting the technical direction, guiding the team in best practices, and fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement, as well as having a strong oversight of the day-to-day operations. This role requires strong leadership skills, technical expertise, financial cloud practices and a passion for driving results. You will also forge strong relationships with 3rd party partners and key stakeholders across other business functions to ensure that product development and new business requirements are understood and supported by the team.
* Reporting to the Director of Technology Operations, you will be responsible for the end-to-end delivery of our multi-cloud engineering function.
* You will ensure the team operates in line with industry best practices and is aligned to the AWS and Azure Well Architected Framework focusing on reliability, security, operational excellence, cost optimization, and performance efficiency.
* Strong oversight of the day-to-day operation of the team, ensuring that incidents are quickly resolved.
* Good grasp of Cloud Financial management / cost optimisation.
* You will provide inspirational and energetic leadership to a team of SMEs that will be a mix of permanent, contract or delivery partner resources and be responsible for their overall engagement, line management, wellbeing, and performance.
* Confident and demonstrate a track record of managing third party delivery partners, tracking their performance against SLAs through service reviews and agreed contractual terms and budgets.
* Highly result-focused, you’ll demonstrate the ability to deliver at pace, set and operationalize strategy, set delivery metrics and execute plans to deliver against these.
* You will have the ability and gravitas to unblock issues and challenges faced during the platform lifecycle so that delivery is not hampered.
* You will demonstrate the ability to build and maintain influential relationships and partnerships with a broad and diverse range of internal and external stakeholders.
* You will create and contribute towards a working environment of positive relations and a culture that is inclusive, collaborative, empowering and delivery focused.
* You will build and continuously evolve a high-performing and engaged cloud services team.
* Ensuring the right tooling, training and resources are made available.
* You’ll be a strong, open and honest communicator, capable of quickly engaging audiences at all levels.
* You will be up to date with new and emerging technologies within the Cloud space.
* Actively identify your own development and training needs within this specialism to develop your skills in Cloud Technologies to meet the requirements of the business.
* Finally, you will be a clear communicator with the ability to take ownership of issues and drive through decisions to conclusion.
Key Measures of Success:
* Team Alignment – Highly motivated and high-performing team aligned to the CCoE framework.
* Team utilization – Resource allocation (mainly internal with some flex using a delivery partner) fully aligned to product roadmap and business aspirations.
* Full cost control – budget aligned to forecasts with cross charging model and cost optimization controls in place.
* Cloud strategy aligned across AWS and Microsoft technologies – standards policies and procedures including tooling/ backup /DR etc.
* Staff satisfaction – Work-life balance and strong satisfaction scores.
* Working knowledge of cloud principles and technologies, including but not exhaustive, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Containerization technologies such as Docker and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes to deploy and manage applications at scale.
* Monitoring and Logging tools such as Cloud Watch.
* Understanding of Cost management including cost optimisation.
* Cloud Security practices.
* Cloud Networking principles.
* Automation of system infrastructure and deployments.
* HA and DR (non-functional operational requirements – auto scaling).
* Cloud Infrastructure architectural principles such as scalability and resilience.
* Understand agile delivery and DevOps practices such as CI/CD.
Key Skills and Experience:
* Bachelor's degree in computer science or related (or equivalent work experience).
* 10+ years of experience in DevOps/Platform/Cloud Engineering.
* 5+ years' experience in leading and motivating high-performing software engineering teams in a heavily regulated environment.
* Advanced understanding of DevOps concepts such as version control, CI/CD, IaC, observability and containerisation.
* Demonstrated ability to drive results, inspire teams, and foster a culture of innovation and excellence.
* Experience in defining and implementing technical architecture and infrastructure solutions.
* Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.
* Ability to work effectively under pressure and manage multiple priorities simultaneously.
* Proven experience managing cloud computing platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization technologies (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes).
* Nice to have experience in Gaming/Lottery sector or other heavily regulated environment.
* Strong analytical and decision-making skills.
* Passion for technology and a commitment to continuous learning.
* Demonstrable experience of managing contractual and commercial relationships with third party delivery partners.
* An ability to nurture and enhance the capabilities of your team, ensuring you grow their skills and support their career development.
* You thrive on responsibility and completing tasks in a timely manner with good, clear communication.
* You are equally comfortable working independently, and in a team to deliver excellence, working across boundaries and within the wider technology function.
* Strong stakeholder management skills, able to understand and relay strategic objectives and plans and drive alignment.
* Excellent communication and influencing skills, including the ability to explain complex technical challenges in a simple and effective manner.
Our goal is to create one of the UK’s most inclusive organisations – where people can bring the best of themselves, to do their best work, every day, for the benefit of good causes.
Allwyn is an equal opportunity employer which prides itself in being diverse and inclusive. We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or victimisation in the workplace. All employment decisions at Allwyn are based on the business needs, the job requirements, and the individual qualifications. Allwyn encourages applications from individuals regardless of age, disability (visible or hidden), sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships.
#J-18808-Ljbffr