Cloud Engineer

Janes empowers military, government, and defence leaders to act with confidence in an increasingly complex world. Our trusted defence, security, and geopolitical information delivered through seamless digital platforms and system integrations—turns overwhelming data into clear, actionable intelligence and insight. By filling critical information gaps, Janes helps customers analyse threats, accelerate decisions, and stay ahead of emerging challenges.

Job purpose:

The primary purpose of the Cloud Engineer is to ensure that Janes remains safe and secure in the cloud through management and ongoing improvement of our multi-account AWS environment. The role sits in the Platform Team, comprising five engineers reporting to the Architecture Director, with a day-to-day focus on core services like network, backup, monitoring, security and governance.

Where required, the role extends into each of our four Service Teams to ensure standards are adopted, appropriate resources are being used to deliver value to our customers, while being operationally resilient, secure and cost effective. The Cloud Engineer is primarily a hands-on role, but there are important design, documentation and communication expectations due to regular engagement with senior stakeholders, as well as day-to-day relationships with Service Teams.

How you will contribute at Janes:

• Design, build, operate and monitor our core cloud infrastructure
• Maintain IaC codebases for platform and common services to be used by service teams.
• Adopt an environment of continuous improvement for security, resilience and cost.
• Ensure services are appropriately patched and maintained to minimise vulnerabilities.
• Ensure standards are adopted across Service Teams.
• Mentor and support Service Teams on appropriate use of cloud resources.
• Contribute to service management processes covering change control, incident management and DR.
• Operate in a fast-paced agile environment, balancing an operational mindset with the need to deliver.

The ideal skills and experience for this role are:

• Extensive cloud experience, with 5+ years AWS and an appreciation of Azure services.
• Experience operating at an organisation-level in a complex multi-account architecture.
• In-depth infrastructure experience across network, backup, observability, security and governance.
• Experience at managing security of systems in line with ISO27001, Cyber essentials or NIST standards.
• In-depth experience with Identity and Access Management, including Privileged Access
• In-depth experience with Terraform, IaC and associated pipeline management.
• Experience managing Windows and Linux servers and associated services, e.g. Directory Services.
• Experience with cloud native, serverless architectures.
• Experience with disaster recovery and service management principles and processes.
• Good understanding of agile and modern software engineering and development practices.
• Experience across a range of the following technologies:
• CloudFront, WAF, AWS Firewall, API Gateway, Transit Gateway
• AWS VPN, Zscaler ZPA, AWS Identity Centre, Microsoft Entra
• AWS Backup, AWS Systems Manager, Security Hub, Guard Duty, Microsoft Defender
• Windows / Linux Operating Systems and Active Directory
• Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail, OpenSearch, Grafana, Kinesis
• Terraform, Git, CloudFormation, Ansible, Azure Devops
• Lambda, EKS, ECS and EC2
• DocumentDB, DynamoDB, RDS, S3, OpenSearch
• EventBridge, Steps, Glue

This position offers a hybrid working model, allowing for flexibility in your work environment. We are looking for a candidate who can be based in either our Manchester or Croydon office, with a minimum requirement of 40% in-office presence. The choice of location will depend on which office is more convenient for the selected candidate.

Benefits

• 27 days of annual leave
• Healthy half (0.5 day leave every 6 months for wellbeing)
• Leave- study/ volunteer/ reserve forces
• Pension plan (6% employer contribution)
• Private medical insurance – BUPA
• Maternity (100% of basic salary for the first 26 weeks followed by Statutory Maternity Pay)
• Paternity (100% of basic salary for 6 weeks)
• Life cover
• Access to LinkedIn Learning
• Access to an on-site gym (only in Croydon)

Our Mission:

Creating trusted open-source intelligence has always been our focus. Janes foundational defence intelligence, across military capabilities and order of battle, equipment, events, and defence industry, is verified and validated using our human-centric tradecraft to deliver the highest levels of assurance.

While open-source data is readily available to analysts and decision makers, it can be unmanageable in structure and volume, is not assured, and can be manipulated either intentionally or unintentionally. Janes open-source intelligence is verified and validated through our Tradecraft processes within our Single Intelligence Environment (SIE). Janes uses a multi-faceted approach to open-source intelligence, developed over 120 years, with all sources assessed for bias/objectivity, reliability, and level of certainty.

We excel at capturing and making sense of open-source information to regularly reveal new and timely insights. We provide clients with a definitive source of the ‘what’, the context to understand the ‘why’ and, particularly within our dedicated forecasting products, a prediction of what will happen in the future. Our news provides both a factual journal of record and commentary in order to add the necessary context behind the facts.

Our goal is to ensure our journalism and analysis is better, sharper, more relevant, more comprehensive, and more useful than other open-source providers. We achieve this through employing more than 250 analysts supported by many hundreds more freelance experts to source and verify information. Our experts are supported by technologies such as natural language processing, web scraping and monitoring, data visualization, and other analytical tool sets. A key value we provide is topic selection: deciphering what is salient, standing up the facts, and setting events into context.

Technology at Janes:

To support our Tradecraft we need the best technology solutions and capabilities, particularly in an increasingly complex world with exponentially accelerating volume of relevant information accessible. To respond to this challenge Janes has invested heavily in Technology, both in terms of people and software development.

Our vision is to operate a modern, commercially focused in-house Technology Team that is core to business success through effective partnering with Sales, Product, Research and Data teams to produce best in class OSINT data and product platforms that enable the mission.

We achieve this through our collaborative, supportive team oriented and delivery focused culture, utilising agile methodologies. Our technology group is comprised of cross-functional multi-disciplinary teams located across Croydon and Manchester, led by Phil Smith (Phil Smith | LinkedIn).

Given the complexity of our data and Tradecraft processes we use a broad range of specialist technologies and approaches including AI, ML, graph and document databases, search platforms, serverless technologies and event processing platforms, customer portals, visualisation platforms, Geospatial systems as well as general purpose AWS platform capabilities.

Our world suits those who enjoy working within an empowered, disciplined development environment delivering complex solutions that require genuine problem solving and innovation. We are rightly proud of our culture which is reflected by our very high staff retention rate, which in turn reflects our friendly culture, interesting work, and the importance of our mission.