Cloud Operations Engineer- Shift Lead

Alfa Systems, a leading global provider of enterprise software for the asset finance industry, is expanding its European footprint and has recently opened a new Poland Smart  Hub in Gdańsk. As we continue to grow our Cloud Operations capabilities, we are looking for curious, motivated and detail-oriented individuals to join our team as Cloud Operations Engineer - Shift Lead.
 

About the Role
 

As a Cloud Operations Engineer - Shift Lead, you will play a key role in ensuring the availability, stability and performance of Alfa’s cloud-hosted environments. You will be a, hands-on engineer within the Cloud Operations team, combining deep technical expertise with operational leadership during your shift.
 

In this role, you will not only execute infrastructure and operational tasks yourself, but also coordinate, prioritise and assign work based on requests from Project Teams, while acting as the first line of escalation for incidents and operational issue
 

This is a shift-based operational role (including evenings, nights and weekends on rotation), ensuring 24/7 coverage of mission-critical services.

What You’ll Do

• Coordinate, prioritise and schedule operational work based on incoming requests from Project Managers, assigning tasks within the team and delivering assigned and self-assigned tasks hands-on.

• Act as the first line of escalation during incidents, leading initial investigation, impact assessment and resolution, and escalating where appropriate.

• Lead and support cloud environments running on AWS (including services such as CloudFormation, EC2, S3, RDS, etc.).

• Execute and oversee infrastructure changes using infrastructure-as-code tooling and the AWS Console, in line with defined processes.

• Perform and oversee daily operational checks, incident handling, patching and system maintenance in production environments.

• Maintain a high standard of task administration, ensuring all changes are correctly recorded, tracked and kept up to date.

• Work closely with the Cloud Change Management team to define and improve processes and operational tooling.

• Identify, propose and document process improvements where gaps or inefficiencies are identified.

• Diagnose and resolve common and complex issues by analysing application and infrastructure logs.

• Ensure compliance with information security roles and responsibilities defined for Hosting Operations.

• Provide operational leadership and support as part of the 24/7 shift rota.

 What We Are Looking For
 

We are looking for a process-driven cloud operations engineer who is comfortable taking ownership, leading on shift, and remaining hands-on in day-to-day operations.

Essential

• Strong hands-on experience operating and supporting AWS-based cloud infrastructure in production environments.

• Experience with core AWS services such as EC2, RDS, CloudWatch and CloudFormation (or equivalent IaC tooling).

• Solid Linux/Unix administration experience, including scripting and operational automation.

• Relational database experience, including basic DML and DDL, and user/schema management.

• Experience with log aggregation and monitoring platforms such as Splunk, Sumo Logic or similar.

• Experience analysing and interpreting application and infrastructure logs to diagnose and resolve issues in Java-based systems.

• Experience working within structured operational and change management processes, with a strong process-oriented mindset (e.g. ITIL).

• Experience coordinating and prioritising work, including assigning tasks while remaining hands-on.

• Experience acting as an escalation point within a support or on-call environment.

• Strong communication skills in English (written and spoken), particularly when working with Project Managers and stakeholders.

• Willingness to work in a 24/7 shift rota, including nights and weekends.

Nice to Have

• Previous experience in a Shift Lead, Engineer-on-Duty or similar operational leadership role.

• ITIL Foundation (or equivalent) certification.

• AWS certifications (e.g. Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate, SysOps Administrator).

• Experience managing changes across multiple environments (dev, test, pre-prod, production).

• Database performance tuning and troubleshooting experience.

• Experience with additional AWS services such as DMS, CodeDeploy or Lambda.

• Experience with cloud security and threat monitoring tools (e.g. GuardDuty, Alert Logic, Threat Stack).

• Experience with asynchronous messaging technologies such as Kafka or JMS/ActiveMQ.

• Experience contributing to continuous improvement of operational processes and documentation.

 What We Offer

• A chance to join one of the fastest-growing teams in Alfa’s new Gdańsk Smart Hub.

• Full training and development plan, we will guide you through cloud fundamentals, AWS services, operations and best practices.

• Access to certification paths, internal workshops and mentoring.

• Work in a friendly, international and collaborative environment.You'll work closely with teams across the UK, Europe, US and APAC.

• Quarterly company events in EMEA (travel required up to 4x/year)

• Competitive salary and shift allowance.

• Private Medical Insurance.

• Group Life Insurance.

• Gym Membership Scheme.

• Pension Plan (PPK).

• Hybrid model: 2-3 days remote (after training period), rest from our coworking space at Olivia Centre, Gdańsk.

About Alfa 

With over 500 employees worldwide, we’re a leading provider of software and services to the global auto and equipment finance industries. Alfa Systems, our technology platform, is at the heart of some of the world’s largest asset finance companies.
 

Key to the business case for each implementation is Alfa Systems’ ability to consolidate multiple client systems onto a single platform. Alfa Systems supports both retail and corporate business for auto, equipment, wholesale and dealer finance on a multijurisdictional basis, including leases/loans, originations and servicing. An end-to-end solution with integrated workflow and automated processing using business rules.
 

With over 30 current clients and 26 countries served, Alfa has been delivering successful projects for our customers since 1990, and is expanding rapidly throughout Europe, North America and beyond. We listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2017.
 

With over 35 years of expertise, we combine deep industry knowledge with cutting-edge technology and now we are building our next generation of cloud capabilities in Gdańsk.