Head of Sovereign Cloud

The opportunity

Join us as Head of Sovereign Cloud where you will lead the product strategy, delivery, and operations of our sovereign cloud internal platform. You'll enable internal engineering teams to run regulated payment workloads with the required levels of data residency, access controls, encryption, and operational independence. This leadership role involves partnering across Engineering, Architecture, Security, Risk/Compliance, Legal, and IT Operations to design compliant reference architectures and scale reliable environments across required jurisdictions.

Day-to-day responsibilities

• Define sovereign cloud vision, target operating model, and multi-year roadmap aligned to payment product growth and regulatory requirements

• Lead the design and implementation of sovereign landing zones, secure connectivity, key management, identity and privileged access, logging/monitoring, and compliance automation

• Define and enforce guardrails (policies, templates, golden paths) that make compliant deployments the default whilst providing self-service capabilities

• Partner with Risk/Compliance and Security teams to meet regulatory requirements including PCI DSS, SOC 2/ISAE 3402, ISO 27001, DORA, and GDPR

• Manage CapEx and OpEx budgets, control costs, and provide financial guidance to other departments

• Develop SRE and operational practices tailored for sovereign environments, including incident response and disaster recovery testing

• Drive threat modelling, control validation, and vulnerability management for cloud infrastructure components

• Translate regulatory and customer requirements into actionable deliverables whilst aligning stakeholders on trade-offs and timelines

• Enable internal product and engineering teams through clear documentation, reference implementations, and onboarding support

• Build and lead a high-performing team, setting goals, developing talent, and fostering a culture of ownership and continuous improvement

Who are we looking for

We look for big thinkers. People who can drive positive change, step up and show what's next – people with passion, can-do attitude and a hunger to learn and grow. In practice this means:

• 10+ years in cloud infrastructure/platform engineering or security engineering, including 3+ years leading teams and complex programmes

• Hands-on experience designing and operating regulated cloud environments (PCI, SOC 2, ISO 27001) with audit-ready evidence production

• Strong understanding of sovereign cloud principles: data residency, jurisdictional control, tenant isolation, and operational independence

• Proficiency with modern cloud architectures and tooling (AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, policy-as-code)

• Deep knowledge of identity and access management, encryption/key management, network segmentation, and logging/monitoring in cloud environments

• Track record of delivering highly available, low-latency services with disaster recovery controls suitable for payment processing

• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills to align management teams, engineers, auditors, and internal customers

• Experience in payments, financial services regulation, or European resilience programmes (DORA) would be advantageous