Cloud Engineering Lead

Job description

The Role The Cloud Engineering Lead is a senior technical leader and line manager within the Cloud Engineering function at Fastmarkets. Reporting to the Head of Cloud Engineering, this role combines meaningful hands-on technical delivery with full line management of 3-4 Cloud Engineers. The Lead owns their own technical workstream and maintains visibility across all workstreams running within Cloud Engineering — ensuring delivery health, quality, and team progress across the board. Outside the team, the Cloud Engineering Lead is the face of the function in planning forums, stakeholder conversations, and cross-functional peer discussions. This is a leadership role first. The right person here gets more satisfaction from watching their team deliver well than from landing a technical win on their own. Principal Accountabilities Team Leadership • Maintain clear visibility across all active workstreams in Cloud Engineering, proactively surfacing risks, blockers, and delivery concerns before they escalate. • Act as the first point of escalation for engineers across the team on technical and delivery decisions. • Set the standard for how the team works: technical quality, documentation, peer review, and engineering practice. • Foster an environment where engineers are supported, challenged, and actively developing. Line Management • Own the full line management of 3-4 Cloud Engineers, including regular 1-to-1s, personal development plans, and performance conversations. • Support your engineers’ career development with honesty and intention — including the conversations that are uncomfortable. • Actively mentor less experienced engineers, treating their growth as a deliberate part of your role, not a secondary task. Technical Delivery • Own and deliver your own technical workstream within Cloud Engineering alongside your leadership responsibilities. • Apply engineering judgement across the team’s work, maintaining consistency of approach and technical standards. • Stay technically current across the Azure and DevOps landscape. This role requires credibility with engineers, not just seniority. Stakeholder & Cross-Team Engagement • Represent Cloud Engineering in planning forums, architecture conversations, and cross-functional working groups. • Build and maintain effective working relationships with peer functions — SRE, Data Operations, InfoSec, and engineering teams across the business. • Communicate delivery status, risks, and decisions clearly to senior stakeholders. We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully. If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and have a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly. Essential • Demonstrable depth in Azure — you have built on it, operated it at scale, and solved hard problems in it. This is non-negotiable. • Strong DevOps practice — CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and automation are second nature, not techniques you have read about. • Experience leading technical teams, whether in a formal Lead role or through sustained informal technical leadership with real, demonstrable impact. • A track record of investing in other people’s growth — the engineers who levelled up because of you, not just alongside you. • Comfortable holding the people conversations that aren’t easy — performance, honest development feedback, and raising a concern. • Able to represent your team and your technical decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders and engineering peers. What We’re Less Focused On Your specialism beyond Azure and DevOps. Our Cloud Engineers have varied technical backgrounds and that is by design. We care about your judgement, your leadership, and your foundation — not your overlap with a specific stack. The Person You look across the room before you look at your own screen. You notice when a colleague is stuck, and you do something about it. When your team delivers something well, that feels better than when you deliver something yourself. You are technically credible — your engineers trust your judgement because you have earned it — but you have moved past the point where personal technical achievement is how you keep score. You care about the people behind the roles. You notice when someone on your team is quieter than usual, or when their energy has dipped, and you ask — not as a process step, but because you actually want to know. The engineers who work for you should feel that their manager has their back, not just professionally but as people. Delivery matters, and you hold a high standard, but you understand that sustainable performance comes from a team that feels genuinely supported, not one that is under pressure to perform or else. You might already be a Lead, looking for a team and a scope that will actually use your range. Or you might be a Senior who has been operating as the de facto lead for long enough that the title has started to feel like a lag indicator. Either way, formal people accountability is something you are ready for, not something you are anxious about. What Good Looks Like at 12 Months • Your engineers know where they are going, professionally, and believe you are invested in getting them there. • No workstream in Cloud Engineering surprises you. You have the view, always. • You are trusted by peers and stakeholders to represent Cloud Engineering clearly and reliably. • You have delivered your own workstream and it is running well. • You have had the hard line management conversations when they were needed, and handled them well. If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or qualifications don't perfectly align, we encourage you to apply anyway. Our Values Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values. Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are: METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done GROWTH MINDSET . This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day. CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences. We are committed to ensuring all candidates feel welcomed and supported. Should your application advance and you require accommodations for the interview process, please inform us so we can make the necessary arrangements. Reward and benefits at Fastmarkets We believe in fair pay and benefits that support you both inside and outside of work. Through Fastmarkets Rewards, you'll have access to a range of core benefits and a flexible allowance, giving you the freedom to tailor your package to suit your lifestyle, wellbeing and financial priorities. We know that everyone's needs are different, so we've designed our benefits to support our diverse global team wherever they're based. Specific benefits may vary by country and role. You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you! If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day. It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great. Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets. Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 700 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland and beyond.