Cloud Service Operations Function Lead

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer-focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third party customers.

Job Purpose

The Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) is a newly established area of Canada Life, responsible for managing the overall Cloud Environment for the migration of existing applications and build of any new applications. The CCoE contains a number of Functions, ensuring that the environment is available, stable, secure, resilient and remains compliant with all organisational policies and standards.

The Cloud Service Operations (CloudOps) Function is responsible for managing the Operational Services running within the Cloud environment, specifically:

• DevOps & Deployment Mgmt.
• Configuration Mgmt. & Service Catalogue
• Exit Strategy for Cloud (Operational Playbook)
• Cloud Services Provisioning & Deprovisioning, compliance with Cloud Pre-requisites.
• Source Code Mgmt and security
• Service Resiliency
• Consumption Reporting and management inc "turn it off"
• Network & Infrastructure Mgmt.
• Patch Mgmt. Backup & Recovery Strategy Evergreening of services and
• Logging, Monitoring & Automated Operations and alert response
• Service Availability & Performance Mgmt.
• Operations Continuous Improvement, removal of TOIL
• Incident & Problem Mgmt (including running post-mortem activity and incident metrics)
• Disaster Recovery
• MSP Operational Oversight/Mgmt.
• Cloud Maintenance & Change Mgmt.
• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
• Development of SRE capabilities within the team (coaching, mentoring, developing)
• Development of SRE capabilities across the wider org, shared responsibility model, engineer rotation opportunities.

What you will do

The Cloud Service Operations (CloudOps) Function Lead is responsible for leading the Cloud Service Operations team (Cloud Operations Engineers) and overseeing the operational activity of all Cloud Operations Services, whether this is performed by Canada Life or another party. The role of the CloudOps Function Lead is to drive the vision of achieving a best-in-class service operations and services for Cloud.
This is an opportunity to be part of a new CCoE leadership team as well as grow the Cloud Service Operations team alongside the wider CCoE.

Duties and Responsibilities

The role holder will be expected to have extensive experience (10yrs+) in both IT Infrastructure Operations / DevOps and Cloud operating environments. They may have previously worked as a Cloud Operations Manager or a Lead Cloud Engineer and will be familiar with IT infrastructure and Cloud Operations environments. The role holder should be passionate about striving for best-in-class DevOps standards and keep up to date with the latest developments in the Cloud Industry.
Specific objectives are:

• Ensuring the Cloud environment remains compliant with all IT Operations standards and policies, including within Canada Life and any external requirements that Canada Life must adhere to (e.g. Regulatory)
• Using delegated authority from the Head of Cloud & Dev/Ops, give strategic direction on Cloud Service Operations related matters, including making key decisions on behalf of the CCoE for Operations related changes to the Cloud Environment
• Provide thought leadership to the CCoE on Operations and Cloud, ensuring Canada Life strives to adopt best in class practices
• Act as an active member of the Cloud community both internally and externally
• Act as a mentor and advisor to more junior members of the organisation
• Accountable for all CloudOps related OKR's and KPI's
• Meet all Delivery deadlines allocated by portfolio programmes that depend on the Cloud Environment

Desired Skills, Knowledge and Experience

• Proven experience and knowledge of Cloud Operations and Cloud Infrastructure and IT environments, ideally Azure but not mandatory
• Managerial experience in a technical role
• A strong communicator who is organized, with keen attention to details, and able to multi-task with excellent project management skills
• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills
• Hands-on experience in 24x7x365 cloud operations
• Experience in AWS, Azure or GCS covering cloud native application architecture, Infrastructure as a code using CICD pipelines
• Experience with DevSecOps model and automation tools in AWS and/or Azure platform
• Deep knowledge and exposure of managing and operating complex hybrid environments that include public cloud, data centres and private cloud
• Management and direction of third party suppliers for the execution of the operations services
• Strong negotiation and influencing skills and proven relationship builder
• A natural leader, with experience of leading or coaching others
• Strong knowledge and experience technical understanding of cloud migrations
• Able to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience, emphasising key points for decisions and understanding
• Can act independently with initiative and decisiveness, and is aware of when to escalate issues
• Experience of working in large scale, complex Cloud Migration programmes.
• Strong understanding of the value proposition of Cloud
• Demonstrable experience relevant to the development and effective delivery of Cloud Support Teams
• Extensive experience in design and deployment of IT operating models and organisational change
• Strong commercial acumen and ability to deliver complex IT and business change transformation with a focus on continual innovation and cost optimisation
• Significant experience in Audit, Regulatory, Risk and Compliance engagements in a highly regulated industry. Understand Regulatory expectations across jurisdictions, the challenges of multi-region/ global FS institutions and implications for data and technology

What you'll like about working here
As a Canada Life UK colleague, you'll receive a competitive salary and comprehensive reward package including income protection, private medical insurance and life assurance, along with a generous pension and bonus scheme. You'll also receive the support you need with your personal and professional development.

Diversity and inclusion
Canada Life is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Our role as an employer of choice is to provide the right environment for talented people to do their best work, by respecting, understanding and valuing individual differences.

We appreciate that everyone has different work and life responsibilities. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements, including part time, for any of our roles should this be a requirement for you.