AWS Cloud Operations Engineer

The role

Britbet operates pool betting at 59 British racecourses and 11 greyhound tracks, running on a production AWS estate that directly supports live betting: racing 362 days a year. We're bringing the management of that estate in-house from a managed service provider — and this role is the centre of that move.

You'll be our AWS platform lead: the person who owns the day-to-day running of a business-critical production environment end-to-end. You'll join a small, capable team (network/infrastructure engineer, service desk, a hands-on Head of IT) with a further senior hire planned for 2027, and you'll help shape the runbooks, automation and tooling of the new operating model.

What you'll do

• Own platform operations across our AWS accounts: patching via SSM, backup configuration and verification, IAM, security remediation (Security Hub/GuardDuty), and CloudWatch monitoring.

• Run our RDS (MariaDB) estate: parameter and version management, backup/restore, and the instance scaling cycle around major race meetings (Cheltenham, the Grand National).

• Take ownership of our Terraform codebase and configuration management as we repatriate it from the outgoing provider, plus extend automation where it saves us time.

• Drive cost optimisation as an active workstream: rightsizing, reserved instance/savings plan strategy, anomaly investigation.

• Share out-of-hours cover on a paid rota with a first-response tier and runbooks filtering the noise before it reaches you.

• Work alongside our network engineer on a major 2027 project: standing up a second data-centre hub with certificate-based VPN from 60+ venues and a new Direct Connect into AWS, then decommissioning the 66 AWS site-to-site VPNs.

What we're looking for

Must have:

• Relevant years running production AWS estates (operations, not just project builds).

• Solid EC2/Linux administration and patching workflows (SSM or equivalent).

• Real relational database operations experience — RDS preferred (we run MariaDB, but strong MySQL/PostgreSQL ops translates).

• CloudWatch beyond the basics: alarms, log groups, agent configuration.

• Confident IAM: roles, policies, least-privilege thinking.

• Terraform at 'maintain and extend an existing codebase' level.

• Comfortable committing to a paid on-call rota.

Nice to have:

• MSP background.

• Site-to-site VPN / networking exposure.

• Scripting (Python or Bash) for automation.

• AI Experience for tooling and automation.

• AWS SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer certification (we'll fund it if not).

• Experience in a regulated industry.

• Service Desk – Confluence, Jira

What you'll get

• £50,000 base, 10% discretionary bonus scheme, and a separately paid on-call allowance.

• Pension and private health insurance.

• Certification funding and study time (AWS certs actively supported).

• Hybrid working with a genuine reason to be on-site: race days are the most interesting days in this job.

• A clear development path

• 25 days’ holiday per annum plus Bank Holidays