Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

The Cloud Infrastructure Engineer works day-to-day on all aspects of managing and maintaining the  cloud infrastructure environments that support the software platform we provide to our customers, as  well as our internal systems. This is a hands-on, deeply technical role operating within a regulated  financial services environment, where our infrastructure is directly accessed by customers and  connected to third-party trading, settlement and market data services. 

The successful candidate will combine strong core Azure and Windows infrastructure skills with genuine  depth in networking, firewalling, directory services and database administration. They will be  comfortable owning complex, business-critical migrations end-to-end, liaising directly with vendors and  customers, and producing high-quality documentation to support the wider team and our audit and  compliance obligations.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
• Managing internal and customer server infrastructure on Microsoft Azure, including VMs, Network Security Groups, ExpressRoute, Application Gateways/WAF and other key Azure resources. 
• Designing, configuring and troubleshooting network connectivity between customers, third  parties and our platform, including site-to-site VPNs, routing, NAT/PAT and DNS.
• Administering internal and customer-facing firewalls, in particular Fortinet FortiGate
• Building and maintaining connectivity to external trading, settlement and market data services  (e.g. payment/settlement gateways such as CREST, and trading interfaces).
• Administering and maintaining Active Directory, including trusts, Kerberos delegation, certificate services and certificate lifecycle management.
• Maintaining and supporting Microsoft SQL Server, including patching, monitoring and day-to-day administration, and maintaining our high availability and disaster recovery configurations.
• Testing and maintaining backups and DR processes (including invocation testing) to ensure they meet contracted RPO/RTO obligations.
• Managing and maintaining the Microsoft 365 environment and associated tools.
• Maintaining external-facing infrastructure (e.g. web servers, reverse proxies, DNS and public certificates).
• Routine patching and maintenance of servers and firewalls.
• Maintenance of our software and associated components on Third Platform Services (TPS).
• Responding to IT audit and customer due-diligence information requests and providing  supporting evidence. 
• Work alongside group information security to ensure infrastructure is designed, configured and  maintained in line with security policies, control frameworks and audit requirements, and to  support remediation of identified risks and vulnerabilities. 
• Managing relationships with third-party vendors and suppliers (e.g. Microsoft, Fortinet,  connectivity and settlement providers), including technical liaison, escalations and coordinating  delivery of changes.
• Producing and maintaining clear technical documentation, runbooks and knowledgebase articles to support the team, ensure resilience of knowledge, and satisfy audit requirements.
• Monitoring and responding to alerts as they arise from the infrastructure and monitoring platforms.
• Out-of-hours work for routine maintenance and occasional project work.
• Working on other IT projects relating to infrastructure and security as required.
• Contributing to team planning.

KEY ATTRIBUTES AND SKILLS 
Essential
• Proven experience in a similar technical role involving infrastructure and cloud  technology.
• Experience in an environment providing and supporting B2B customer-facing technology.
• Experience working within a regulated or externally audited industry, with an understanding of contractual obligations and control frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 / ISAE 3402 / AAF, and  CIS benchmarks/controls (or equivalents such as NIST).
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Self-motivated, and capable of tackling complex projects either on their own or as part of a team.
• Able to work collaboratively across different departments/teams with differing technical capabilities, and with external customers and vendors, to deliver effective solutions.
• Proven experience with Microsoft Azure and Windows Server administration.
• Strong networking and firewalling depth, in particular NAT/PAT, site-to-site (IPsec) VPN, routing and DNS.
• Advanced Active Directory administration, including trusts, Kerberos delegation and certificate management.
• Microsoft Entra ID / Azure AD in depth – Enterprise applications, SSO, Conditional Access, hybrid identity.
• Microsoft SQL Server administration – backup/restore and recovery, security/permissions, SQL Agent job management.
• Knowledge of Windows-based IIS application administration.
• PowerShell scripting.
• Office 365 administration and automation.
• Experience with backup and DR tools and processes.
• Strong documentation skills and experience managing third-party vendors/suppliers.

Desirable 
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM administration.
• ADFS administration.
• SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery design: e.g. Always On availability groups, clustering, log shipping.
• Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server administrator.
• Fortinet/FortiGate firewall administration.                                                                                      
• Experience with PRTG, Grafana, or similar monitoring platforms.
• Atlassian suite – Jira ticketing and project management, Confluence documentation

Industry-specific experience:
• Payment/settlement gateways (e.g. CREST/Euroclear), trading  interfaces, CASS, and similar financial-market infrastructure.
• Wealth management / stockbroking domain knowledge.
• Understanding of modern infrastructure automation such as Terraform.

A little about us  
We’re the Nucleus Financial Platforms group and we help make retirement more rewarding.  

People come first - whether it’s our colleagues, or the advisers and customers we support, we know that working in partnership and collaboration leads to the best outcomes. Together, we’ve shaped the platform to how it is today. We work hard, and we celebrate hard too.  

Our ambition is to create a platform with a difference, putting the customer centre stage meant tearing up the rule book and starting from scratch. We’ve come a long way since then, but our mission remains just as focused. That’s why our culture, values, and social responsibility are things we keep at the top of our agenda – because we know they matter and have a big impact.  

Our culture is one of the many things that sets us apart from the pack. We want to have an environment where our people feel that they can make a real difference, know they’ll be rewarded for their efforts and more importantly, enjoy themselves at work.  

Inclusion and diversity at Nucleus  
As with most things in life, who cares, wins. We really care about inclusion.  
For us it’s not a tick box exercise; inclusion and diversity are embedded in our culture and everything we do. It’s a commercial imperative. It isn’t about being PC. It’s about being future-relevant and durable. We owe it to ourselves and the industry to ensure we are playing our part in creating a fair, balanced and transparent financial services sector.  

More diversity means broader experience, a wider set of perspectives and a better collective ability to problem-solve. And it means being more representative of customer groups, which supports areas such as product development.  

At Nucleus, we offer a generous blend of benefits for the things that really matter to our people, including a non-contributory pension, bonus, enhanced parental leave, paid time off for emergencies, health and wellbeing initiatives and flexible working options.