Join Us at SRT Marine Systems as a Cloud Engineer.

Location: Hybrid - UK-based, 1 day per week in our Cardiff office
Department: Systems Development
Reporting to: Team Lead Developer

At SRT Marine Systems, we are global leaders in maritime surveillance, delivering cutting-edge systems that enhance maritime domain awareness and safety. We are seeking an experienced Cloud Engineer to help design, deploy, and configure our system to run in a hybrid cloud / on-prem non-production environment in AWS so that we can understand how a key part of our application scales. The primary focus is to provision and manage virtual machines (EC2 instances), not for development, but for testing and staging workloads, ensuring scalability, security, and cost-efficiency.

Because our system is akin to a defence system, for security reasons it is not cloud-based but rather deployed on-prem - what we refer to as "air-gapped". Our clients do not want their system exposed to the internet. This means that none of our architecture is cloud native - no serverless. Serverless is not a requirement, we require simple lift and shift of a single VM plus configurable horizontal scalability of that single VM instance.

Our application team will specify what this single VM looks like in terms of platform (Linux) and application-level stack (database, rabbit, services hosted in docker containers). We simply need help provisioning multiple horizontal instances of this single VM instance, like you would achieve with elastic auto-scaling middleware like Kubernetes (but we will not be using Kubernetes). The idea is to be able to flexibly configure IaC and deploy a fixed number of instances that we choose for a test case - 20, 30, 40 single VM instances - simulating a large client fixed (non-elastic) implementation.

As for the hybrid nature of the system, these multiple instances of the same VM will communicate with other nodes of the system, running on prem. We have a networking team that can assist with the relevant networking connectivity aspects - firewall config etc.

Members of the application team do have AWS experience, including AWS solution architect certification, and we already have an AWS presence for workloads run by other teams. These team members will be available to help, but will largely be working on other projects. We need dedicated resource for this task.

Cost governance is an important requirement of this role.

Key Responsibilities:

• Work with the application development team and network team to implement IaC for a single application VM as part of a partial non-prod cloud infrastructure in AWS.
• Provision and configure EC2 instances to simulate production-like environments.
• Set up networking components including VPCs, subnets, security groups, NAT gateways, and route tables.
• Setup VPN connection between AWS VPC and on premises network in a cost efficient way.
• Implement automated provisioning using Infrastructure as Code tools. Initially keep it simple and merely auto-gen the YAML. More advanced tooling - like Terraform, CloudFormation - might be considered at a later time. This is not a large scale IaC effort and so the sophistication of the approach much be proportionate to the complexity of the problem.
• Configure monitoring, logging, and alerting using CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and related services. Alternatively, use our existing monitoring and observability tooling.
• Work with stakeholders to understand non-prod use cases and tailor infrastructure accordingly.
• Ensure cost optimization and proper tagging of cloud resources.
• Implement basic IAM policies, roles, and access control best practices.
• Late r phases to include more sophisticated test cases, building on previous phases, involving high availability and resiliency where needed in this hybrid non-prod environment.
• Document architecture, procedures, and deployment steps.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Proven experience as a Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, or Infrastructure Engineer in AWS environments.
• Hands-on experience with EC2, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, S3, EBS, Route 53s.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform preferred).
• Familiarity with Linux/Unix system administration.
• Strong understanding of cloud security and access control.
• Ability to automate common operational tasks and deployments using scripts or automation tools.
• Experience with version control (e.g., Git).
• Excellent communication skills and documentation habits.

Preferred Qualifications:

• AWS certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate or SysOps Administrator).
• Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
• Familiarity with containerization (e.g., Docker) even if not part of initial deployment.
• Previous experience building dev/test environments at scale.

Work Environment:

• Collaborative and remote-friendly team.
• Agile/Scrum development cycles.
• Access to modern cloud tools and platforms.

Deliverables:

• Fully functional AWS non-production hybrid environment.
• Infrastructure-as-Code templates (e.g., Terraform modules).
• Network and security configuration.
• Operational runbook and documentation.
• Final knowledge transfer session with internal team.