Cloud Operations Engineer (3-month contract)

Cloud Operations Engineer (3 month contract) - (Cheltenham/Hybrid)

About Finova

Finova is the UK’s largest mortgage and savings technology provider, powering one in every five mortgages across the country. Our agile, cloud-native solutions help over 60 banks, building societies, specialist lenders and equity release providers — plus a network of 2,400+ brokers — stay ahead of the market.

We offer a flexible, proven suite of software that covers the full customer journey — from mortgage and savings origination to servicing and CRM. Backed by an open architecture and a team with deep industry expertise, our platform is built to scale. Today, we process over £50 billion in loans each year, manage nearly £50 billion in savings, and support the digital servicing of more than 650,000 UK borrower accounts.

For Lenders

Finova offers a flexible, modular technology suite designed to help lenders move faster, scale efficiently, and deliver standout digital experiences. You can run your entire mortgage and savings business on Finova — or just use the modules you need, tailored by our team or configured in-house through our low-code platform.

Our solutions include:

• Lending – end-to-end mortgage and specialist lending software built for speed, flexibility, and scale.
• Decisioning – powerful tools for smarter, more personalised lending decisions.
• Servicing – intuitive workflows and automation to simplify day-to-day account management and customer servicing.
• Savings – configurable onboarding and customer engagement tools across all savings products.
• Intermediary Manager – broker relationship and compliance management, powered by real-time external data.
• Broker ID – fast, automated broker verification and compliance tracking using KYB, KYC, and live monitoring from public data sources.

Lenders use Finova to launch products faster, process applications up to 50% more efficiently, and reduce operational costs — all while staying fully compliant in a fast-moving market.

About the Role:

As a Contract Lead Cloud Operations Engineer, you will be engaged for a 3-month period to immediately contribute to the availability, security, resilience, and performance of the Apprivo cloud platform. This role is firmly hands-on and operational, focusing on providing essential technical leadership, rapid prioritisation, and ensuring operational stability across the Cloud Operations function during this term.

Reporting to the Director of Cloud Operations, you will operate as a senior technical practitioner and escalation point, leading by example in day‑to‑day BAU operations and executing higher‑risk infrastructure changes. You will be crucial in maintaining high‑quality operational support while accelerating continual improvements in resilience, automation, monitoring, incident management maturity, and security posture within the contract timeframe.

This contract suits an experienced engineer who enjoys rapidly operating and improving complex SaaS platforms, providing hands-on coaching, and collaborating closely with development, QA, security, and database teams to deliver critical services to regulated clients.

About you:

You are an experienced, hands-on Cloud Operations Engineer with a strong bias toward reliability, security, and operational discipline, combined with the ability to provide immediate technical leadership and drive results. You bring:

• Extensive experience in Cloud Operations, with deep hands‑on knowledge managing Azure‑hosted production environments, including Azure App Services, Application Gateways, and a strong understanding of Azure Networking components (VNets, Load Balancers, NSGs, routing).
• Strong technical competency in core infrastructure, including Windows Server administration, operational Microsoft SQL Server support (not a DBA role), and solid networking and load‑balancing fundamentals.
• Extensive experience executing and supporting CI/CD pipelines, including troubleshooting failed deployments and infrastructure automation issues.
• Strong monitoring and observability experience, using tools such as Datadog, Azure Monitor, Azure AppInsights, or equivalent, to proactively identify and resolve issues.
• A disciplined, process‑driven approach to change management, security, access control, and operational governance in regulated environments.

What will you be doing?

• Lead the operation of Apprivo Azure production and non‑production environments, with deep hands‑on ownership of Azure App Services, Azure Networking, storage, and compute.
• Drive immediate technical stabilization efforts, focusing on addressing root causes of recurrent platform defects, legacy configurations, and environmental vulnerabilities to secure a foundation for long-term operational resilience.
• Act as a senior escalation point for platform and application issues, performing second‑ and third‑line triage and coordinating incident resolution across teams.
• Execute and oversee higher‑risk infrastructure and platform changes, ensuring strong adherence to change management, security, and release controls.
• Support delivery teams with complex automated deployments and configuration changes, diagnosing and resolving failed or degraded releases.
• Provide operational support for Microsoft SQL Server alongside the DBA team, including service health checks, job monitoring, backup verification, basic performance triage, and supporting application teams during database‑related incidents.
• Work closely with DBA and development teams where deeper database design, query optimisation, schema changes, or platform tuning are required.
• Own and continuously improve monitoring and alerting standards, ensuring high signal‑to‑noise visibility of platform health and early detection of service‑impacting issues.
• Lead performance and capacity triage activities, identifying trends and bottlenecks before they affect service availability.
• Participate in, and provide senior cover for, the out‑of‑hours on‑call rota, responding to P1/P2 incidents and supporting scheduled out‑of‑hours deployments.
• Lead and support resilience and disaster recovery activities, including failover testing, game days, and validation of runbooks and operational readiness.
• Assess, prioritise, and remediate vulnerability findings, working from automated security tooling, configuration reviews, and third‑party penetration test outputs.
• Lead incident post‑mortems, providing technical insight and ensuring agreed preventative actions are implemented.
• Assist with audit and compliance activities, gathering and validating operational evidence for ISO, regulatory, and client assurance exercises.
• Provide day‑to‑day technical leadership and guidance to Cloud Operations Engineers, helping prioritise work, coaching engineers, and improving runbooks, documentation, and operational standards.
• Establish and execute a structured skills transfer program, mentoring Cloud Operations Engineers on advanced Azure troubleshooting, security review processes, and high-risk change execution, ensuring knowledge retention and increased team autonomy.
• Act as a reliable senior technical point of contact for internal and external stakeholders, providing clear, confident updates during incidents, changes, and BAU activities.
• Actively assist the hiring manager in the recruitment process for the permanent Lead Cloud Operations Engineer, including technical screening, interview participation, and candidate assessment.