Cloud Platform Engineer

UCAS is at the heart of connecting people to higher education.

UCAS is the world’s leading shared admissions service for higher education. We provide application services for UK universities and colleges as well as delivering a wide range of research, consultancy and advisory services to schools, colleges, careers services, professional bodies and employers.

We’re a successful and fast-growing organisation, which helps hundreds of thousands of people every year. We're committed to delivering a first-class service to all of our customers — they're at the heart of everything we do.

The Digital Services business unit is at the heart of UCAS’ technical innovation, data and infrastructure. It focuses on leveraging data science, technology, and enterprise architecture to enhance UCAS' digital products and services.

The unit is dedicated to developing and improving customer-centric digital solutions, ensuring seamless and secure online experiences for all users. By providing insightful data and analysis, often made available to anyone with free-to-use intuitive dashboard, Digital Services empowers the Higher Education sector and those interested in the sector with valuable information to make informed decisions. By working in collaborative, expert led, multi-disciplinary teams, Digital Services drives UCAS’ mission to connect students with their next opportunities through advanced technological solutions.

For our dedicated, specialist team of Cloud Platform Engineers, this means our systems need to support millions of users from across the UK and internationally with incredibly fun (or challenging, depending upon one's outlook) SLAs across availability, scalability, security, performance, observability and (we're committed to efficiency) cost. 

This role is about working in an awesome team to manage our cloud estates (via a GitOps, code-first model) and create awesome platforms that underpin all of UCAS's systems.

As part of a specialised Cloud Platform Engineering team, you will leverage advanced technical skills and coding to build fit-for-purpose, automated cloud platforms while minimizing operational overheads. You will establish and maintain cloud and coding best practices, ensuring the secure, efficient, and scalable management of cloud platforms. This includes designing security protocols, optimizing hosting infrastructure, and maintaining access control for cloud environments. mentoring, You'll play an active role within the team to share knowledge, support others to create great solutions and have open discussions sharing ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes (as its a great way to learn and get experience by proxy!).

You’ll work collaboratively to create and maintain cloud architecture standards, automate deployments, and reduce technical drag. With a focus on automation, you will build robust Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) pipelines and cloud services that are scalable, fault-tolerant, and secure. Additionally, you will take ownership of the full lifecycle of cloud accounts.

Your role will include driving cloud engineering best practices, staying up-to-date with evolving cloud technologies, and acting as a subject matter expert (SME) to guide engineering teams. You will ensure the operational quality, security, and cost-effectiveness of UCAS’s cloud platforms while driving innovation in cloud platform engineering initiatives across the organization.

The ideal candidate possesses excellent communication skills, enabling effective dialogue with both technical and non-technical audiences. With at least 3 years of hands-on experience in cloud engineering — especially AWS or GCP — they are skilled in developing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, working with containers (Docker, ECS).

As well as being able to create excellent terraform code, we're looking for candidates proficient in cloud services (AWS or GCP preferred, with Azure also welcomed), scripting (especially Python), and with experience with Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) via a GitOps model. Whilst cloud certifications are welcomed, the ability to quickly learn and acquire domain knowledge is of more importance. They have experience maintaining applications and showcasing innovations, with a focus on seeing through complexity to create elegant automation across cloud environments.

For a full job description please see attached role profile

Salary - up to £52,000

· 30 days annual leave (plus 3 concessionary days over Christmas and your bank holidays!)


· Flexibility – UCAS positively supports Hybrid working for its employees, meaning you can work between home and the office in a way that suits you and the business and also has a comprehensive Flexible Working Policy


· A generous pension scheme

· Hundreds of high street discounts and offers with Perkbox

· Internal training and development

· Subsidised gym and café

· Be rewarded for going above and beyond with our ex-gratia bonus scheme and Celebrating U, our quarterly employee recognition scheme

· Dedicated volunteer employee networks promoting wellbeing, awareness and inclusion

Studies have shown that some groups of people are less likely to apply to a role unless they tick every box. At UCAS we recognise that talent comes in various forms and we are committed to delivering a fair and equitable recruitment process where applicants have an equal opportunity to demonstrate their skills. So, if you are interested in this vacancy, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still apply.

If you have any questions and would like to find out more about the role before applying please email the Talent Acquisition team via careers@ucas.ac.uk and one of us will be in touch.