Senior Cloud Engineer - AI Platform

As a Senior Cloud Engineer for the AI Platform, you will be heavily involved in designing, building, and maintaining the underlying platform infrastructure that enables the business to develop, deploy, and scale autonomous AI agents and workloads. You will collaborate with architects, security teams, and business stakeholders to engineer and manage a scalable, reliable, and highly secure foundation across Microsoft Azure and GCP, delivering standard templates, robust pipelines, and platform guardrails that accelerate innovation while ensuring governance and production-readiness. In addition, as a senior engineer, you are expected to support and mentor junior team members through code review, lead technical workshops, and endorse cloud best practices.

You will be a key driver in delivering the foundational platform capabilities (including vector datastores, identity and access controls, MCP integrations, and FinOps) and acting as a gate for the productionisation of proven PoCs.

Your responsibilities will extend to implementing observability, token tracing, prompt injection defense, and built-in guardrails to proactively resolve issues, ensuring all infrastructure adheres to zero-trust security best practices, and managing platform stability and availability.

You will act as a crucial point of escalation, mentor junior team members, and take a lead role in coordinating the resolution of major issues. You will also participate in incident response, disaster recovery efforts, and work closely with other technology teams to establish a secure, enterprise-grade AI launchpad that eliminates shadow IT and speeds up time-to-production for new business solutions.

You are an experienced and proactive engineer with a deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, networking architecture, automation, and security tailored for AI platforms and workloads. You are confident in scoping, designing, and planning large, complex projects, translating business requirements into robust, secure, and pragmatic technical solutions. You excel at managing stakeholder expectations and communicating clearly with senior management.

As a senior figure, you are a natural mentor, capable of coaching junior team members, developing standards, and acting as a subject matter expert for cloud and AI infrastructure.

What You’ll Bring

Conditions apply to all benefits. These benefits are discretionary and subject to change.

We aim to support all candidates during the application process and are happy to provide workplace adjustments when necessary. Should you need support with your application due to a disability or long-term condition, feel free to get in touch with us by email headoffice_careers@next.co.uk (please include 'Workplace Adjustments' in the subject line), or call us on 0116 284 2486 and leave a voicemail.

• 25% off most NEXT, MADE*, Lipsy*, Gap* and Victoria's Secret* products (*when purchased through NEXT)

• Company performance based bonus

• Sharesave scheme

• On-site Nursery available; OFSTED outstanding in all areas

• 10% off most partner brands & up to 15% off Branded Beauty

• Early VIP access to sale stock

• Access to fantastic discounts at our Staff Shops

• Restaurants with great food at amazing prices

• Access a digital GP and other free health and wellbeing services

• Free on-site parking

• Financial Wellbeing - Save, track and enhance your financial wellbeing

• Apprenticeship - Grow and develop on the job whilst gaining a qualification

• Direct to Work - Discount online and instore, collect your items the next day for free from your place of work or local store

• Support Networks - Access to Network Groups to empower and celebrate each other

• Wellhub - Discounted flexible monthly gym memberships, with apps, PT sessions and more