Cloud Platform Team Lead

About Smartwyre

Founded in 2018, Smartwyre is a venture-financed SaaS business delivering enterprise software to large agricultural businesses, operating in a $400 billion global industry. With an estimated 5 million farmers and over 5,000 distributors globally, Smartwyre works across the agricultural supply chain, from large corporations to local farms. Presently, we work from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and South America.

We are building a B2B SaaS platform to network together the commercial operations of the companies that supply the world’s farmers with seeds, fertilizer, chemicals, and services, with their target markets being the United States, Europe, and Latin America. We aim to first offer SaaS applications to solve key commercial pain points (pricing, costing, quoting), then network these companies using a common data platform (transactional data exchange, product information publication, people networking, and user analytics), and finally empower the network to facilitate new business model amongst network participants.

About the role

• Overview: A remote, permanent, full-time Cloud Platform Team Lead reporting to the SVP of Engineering, requiring working-hours overlap across the UK and US. You will lead the cloud team and own the Azure platform.

• The Mission: A hands-on role combining infrastructure design and operations with team leadership. You will provide secure hosting for internal agents and MCP workloads, own SOC 2 infrastructure compliance, and drive developer self-service so other teams can deploy independently.

What you'll do

• Hands-On Infrastructure & Terraform: Design, write, and review modular Terraform across multiple environments, and operate core production Azure services (App Service, Functions, PostgreSQL, Key Vault).
• Developer Self-Service & CI/CD: Build versioned infrastructure templates and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) to empower engineering teams to provision and deploy services independently.
• AI & Agentic Workloads: Own secure, repeatable hosting and deployment patterns for internal agents and MCP workloads, partnering with Architecture on network guardrails and cost controls.
• Team Leadership & Delivery: Run team ceremonies, 1:1s, performance reviews, and capacity planning while actively mentoring and developing engineers.
• Security & SOC 2 Compliance: Maintain first-class cloud security (least-privilege IAM, network isolation) and own the infrastructure controls, audit evidence, and pen-test remediation for SOC 2.
• FinOps & Cost Reporting: Track cloud spend, drive optimisations (reservations, rightsizing), and coordinate consolidated monthly cost reports across Azure, Snowflake, and Estuary.

Experience

• Proven experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps, including leading engineers and owning team delivery.
• Strong production experience with Azure across multiple subscriptions and environments (networking, Entra ID identity, PaaS data services, cost management).
• Expert-level Terraform skills (reusable modules, state management, multi-environment deployments, line-by-line plan review).
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and/or Azure DevOps, plus reusable infrastructure patterns for other teams.
• Strong scripting capabilities in PowerShell, Bash, or Python (heavy usage of PowerShell).
• Hands-on security and compliance experience (SOC 2 or ISO 27001 control ownership, audit evidence, access reviews, pen test remediation).
• Demonstrated leadership in capacity planning, developing engineers, driving adoption, and engaging senior stakeholders.
• Practical background in platform monitoring, incident response, backups, and tested recovery procedures.
• Clear written communication skills for RFCs, runbooks, and executive reports, alongside participation in on-call rotations.

Desirable

• Experience with AI/agent platforms (Azure AI Foundry, MCP) and daily use of AI coding assistants.
• Deep PostgreSQL operations and FinOps practice.
• Containerisation proficiency (Docker, Azure Container Apps) and monitoring expertise (Grafana, Azure Monitor, SLOs).

Benefits

Competitive salary

Private Health (UK - BUPA) / Competitive Health Insurance (US)

Short Term / Long Term Disability Cover (US)

Critical Illness and Income Protection (UK)

Self-directed PTO

Flexible Work Location

Flexible Hours

Pension (UK) / 401k (US)