Senior Cloud Engineer - AI Platform

The Role:

As a Senior Cloud Engineer for the AI Platform, you will be heavily involved in designing, building, and maintaining the underlying platform infrastructure that enables the business to develop, deploy, and scale autonomous AI agents and workloads. You will collaborate with architects, security teams, and business stakeholders to engineer and manage a scalable, reliable, and highly secure foundation across Microsoft Azure and GCP, delivering standard templates, robust pipelines, and platform guardrails that accelerate innovation while ensuring governance and production-readiness. In addition, as a senior engineer, you are expected to support and mentor junior team members through code review, lead technical workshops, and endorse cloud best practices.

You will be a key driver in delivering the foundational platform capabilities (including vector datastores, identity and access controls, MCP integrations, and FinOps) and acting as a gate for the productionisation of proven PoCs.

Your responsibilities will extend to implementing observability, token tracing, prompt injection defense, and built-in guardrails to proactively resolve issues, ensuring all infrastructure adheres to zero-trust security best practices, and managing platform stability and availability.

You will act as a crucial point of escalation, mentor junior team members, and take a lead role in coordinating the resolution of major issues. You will also participate in incident response, disaster recovery efforts, and work closely with other technology teams to establish a secure, enterprise-grade AI launchpad that eliminates shadow IT and speeds up time-to-production for new business solutions.

What You’ll Take On:

You are an experienced and proactive engineer with a deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, networking architecture, automation, and security tailored for AI platforms and workloads. You are confident in scoping, designing, and planning large, complex projects, translating business requirements into robust, secure, and pragmatic technical solutions. You excel at managing stakeholder expectations and communicating clearly with senior management.

As a senior figure, you are a natural mentor, capable of coaching junior team members, developing standards, and acting as a subject matter expert for cloud and AI infrastructure.

What You’ll Bring:

• Azure Foundations, Scaffolding & Landing Zones (Cloud Governance, AI Guardrails & Best Practice)
• Azure Container Apps, AKS, and Container Registries
• Vector Datastores, Secure Storage Encryption, and AI Memory Infrastructure
• Agent Identity Management, EntraID, RBAC, and Zero-Trust Access Controls
• Model Evaluations & Security Controls (Prompt Injection Defense, Guardrails)
• AI Observability, Token Tracing and FinOps / Cost Controls
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) Integrations & Tooling Pipelines
• Terraform, Ansible, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Module Development
• Azure DevOps (CI/CD, Security, Pipeline Automation)
• Azure Networking (Express Route, Virtual Networks, ASG / NSG, Azure Firewall, DNS)
• APIM
• Automation & Scripting
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  
• #LI-LE1 #LI-Hybrid

You know Next, but did you know we’re a FTSE-100 retail company employing over 44,000 people across the Next group. We’re the UK’s 2nd largest fashion retailer and for Kidswear we’re the market leader. At the last count we have over 450 stores, plus the Next Online and it’s now possible to buy on-line from over 80 countries around the world! So we’ve gone global!