Azure Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Job Title: Infrastructure Manager - Cloud Engineer - Azure

Royal Mail and our evolving journey

With a long and proud history, Royal Mail is one of the most visible and trusted brands in the UK. We keep people and businesses connected every hour of every day and we’re passionate about harnessing technology to deliver the best possible results for our customers.

Our business is thriving by continuously adapting and adopting advanced technology. We reach every delivery point in the UK and have over 30 million customer touch points per day. We have 165,000 employees, 80,000 PDA’s and 30,000 end IT users. We are in an exciting period of transformation with significant growth in parcel & packet volumes and online services and we’re focusing on investing in the security, technology, processes, and people that are going to help us continue to achieve great things and grow our business. 

We have the UK’s largest “Feet on the Street” network of over 85,000 postmen and women and the lowest reported carbon emissions per parcel of any major UK delivery company. We are committed to providing sustainable services as we deliver against our environmental ambitions. We are investing in technologies such as electric vehicles and drones.

The RMG Technology team are influencing and helping drive the changes across the business as new solutions and services and new ways of working are defined and delivered and we need talented, experienced people who can work at pace and scale to join us and help achieve our goals.

Role: Infrastructure Manager – Cloud Engineer

Job Purpose

Infrastructure Manager – Cloud Engineer - Azure will be a subject matter expert in Azure, in addition must have in depth technical knowledge of traditional physical, virtualised, hybrid and converged hosting models.

Cloud Engineers are responsible for delivering Strategic Infrastructure Initiatives and maintaining service availability with accountability for annual cloud budgets exceeding £10 million.

Cloud Infrastructure Managers take a lead role in the RM Cloud Centre of Excellence that ensures RM drives value from cloud technologies. To be successful it is essential that Cloud Infrastructure Managers build strong relationships with numerous stakeholders:
Senior Infrastructure Managers – Infrastructure Managers will influence the delivery of major Infrastructure Improvement Programmes working closely with Senior Infrastructure Managers providing technical expertise and guidance.

Architecture – Cloud Infrastructure Managers will work closely with Architects from all Architecture disciplines (Enterprise, Solution, Cyber, Infrastructure and Data) to ensure that business solutions align to published best practice from cloud vendors and fit into the wider RM technology landscape. Cloud Infrastructure Managers must understand the current landscape and identify where improvements can be made to improve service availability (fixing repeat incidents – i.e. problems)

Technology Portfolios –  Cloud Infrastructure Managers will work with technology portfolios to ensure that that any services that leverage cloud platforms are aligned to solid cloud foundations. Providing support and guidance to project, product and platforms teams

Supplier and Partners  – Cloud Infrastructure Managers must build strong relationships with suppliers, vendors and business partners to drive service restoration and root cause analysis and drive transformational enhancements

Cyber Professionals – working closely with Cyber professionals to ensure that best practice security controls are introduced to provide protection but balanced with the impact to user experience.

Service Management – Cloud Infrastructure Mangers will act as the central point of contact when making technology related decisions / service improvement plans (incidents, change, etc). – Cloud Infrastructure Managers will actively drive incident management or service restoration for core Landing Zone service incidents.

Key Accountabilities

• Infrastructure Managers will be the technical engineering authority for multiple cloud platforms (Azure, GCP & AWS), ensuring that anything that consumes cloud resources is done so in line with Cloud Adoption Framework of the corresponding cloud provider.
• Driving the migration of >3k workloads from on premise data centres to Software Defined Data Centres (SDDC) leveraging both native and hybrid cloud architectures.
• Ensuring that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scripts are managed and maintained within a central git repository and are maintained for core environmental configuration changes.
• Driving the automation agenda to introduce self service for platform & product engineering to unlock Product based DevSecOps ways of working.
• Accountable for defining, publishing, deploying and maintaining Cloud blueprints, guidelines, standards, patterns, and policy to drive consistency across all cloud technologies.
• Be an active member of the Cloud Centre of Excellence establishing collaborative ways of working with other CCoE members from other Technology functions.
• Work with the wider CCoE team to define a detailed Cloud Roadmap, publish, and promote allowing prioritisation, resource and budget alignment.
• Part of a cross functional team to define and embed a FinOps culture throughout RM technology and wider business functions, allowing cost controls to be applied to cloud resources.
• Risk and Issues Log Identify and report all risks and issues (provide severity and likelihood) related to your tower that are causing incidents and/ or are having (or could have) an adverse effect on service performance.
• Recommendation Development. Based on all known information, prioritise the development of recommendations & mitigation activities – to include all risks and costs of each initiative.
• Supporting professional accreditation audit, and compliance.
• Developing Relationships - Cloud Infrastructure Managers will be and active member of the Technology & Data Design Authority community, leading workshops and events to drive the value from cloud technologies and understand future roadmaps from across the technology landscape.

• Professional Development - Manage your professional development and identify opportunities (training courses, seminars, conferences etc) that will enable you to remain a leading expert for your respective infrastructure tower.
• Stakeholder Engagement Identify key stakeholders for technologies within your infrastructure tower and utilise them as a source of information, to challenge and support your decision / recommendation process.
• Tower Integration - Actively contribute to Infrastructure strategy to promote the visibility of activities across technology.
• Infrastructure Roadmaps – Develop and Publish a holistic infrastructure roadmap detailing prioritised initiatives for your tower to help modernise the technology landscape, to mitigate service risks and underpin investment forecasting.
• Reporting - Actively contribute to monthly reporting governance packs that are presented to technology executives.
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – Understand the TCO for the technologies within your infrastructure tower, identify opportunities to ensure that services are managed and maintained in an efficient manner.
• Data Accuracy – ensure that technologies within your infrastructure tower are accurately reflected within the Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
• IaC Proficiency - Take lead on designing, publishing and maintaining Terraform code via Azure Devops pipelines to support all core infrastructure deployments

Reports to Senior Infrastructure Manager

Key dimensions

Ability to create high performing virtual teams across multiple Suppliers to ensure successful Service delivery.

Deliver key infrastructure services in line with the IM Handbook

Ability to leverage relationships to drive delivery within agreed timelines.

Key competencies

Core Skills:

Microsoft Azure: Landing Zone, Terraform, Azure Networking, ExpressRoute

Cloud Agnostic: - Guard Rails, FinOps, Policy, CCoE, RBAC, SDCI, CASB

Other: Azure DevOps platform, Azure AD, Azure Hybrid Benefit