Cloud Operations Owner

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Cloud Operations Owner (AWS) to lead the operation and continuous improvement of our AWS cloud services across DS Smith.

This is a critical role within our IT&T function, responsible for ensuring high-quality, secure, and efficient cloud operations through close collaboration with strategic partners and internal stakeholders. You will act as the primary point of contact for AWS operations, overseeing service performance, driving operational excellence, and ensuring alignment with business priorities.

You will play a key role in managing service delivery, improving cloud performance, and ensuring strong governance frameworks are in place, while contributing to the organisations broader digital transformation agenda.

Key responsibilities include:

• Acting as the subject matter expert and escalation point for AWS operations

• Owning major incidents and driving resolution through internal teams and partners

• Ensuring adherence to SLAs, KPIs, governance standards, and operational metrics

• Driving continuous service improvement initiatives with partners and internal teams

• Leading service reviews and maintaining robust operational reporting

• Governing change, release, and incident management processes to minimise disruption

• Conducting root cause analysis and implementing preventative improvements

• Overseeing AWS infrastructure operations across compute, storage, networking, and security

• Ensuring compliance with security, audit, and regulatory requirements

• Ensuring operational readiness for new services

• Embedding best practice standards and consistent ways of working across IT&T

• Collaborating with cross-functional teams including Cloud, DevOps, Security, and Engineering

• Building strong relationships with stakeholders across business and technology functions

About you

You are a highly capable cloud operations leader with strong AWS expertise and a passion for delivering high-quality IT services in complex, enterprise environments.

We are looking for:

• Proven experience managing AWS cloud operations or managed services environments

• Strong knowledge of AWS services (e.g. EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch)

• Experience working with ITIL-based service management (incident, problem, change)

• A track record of managing vendors and strategic technology partners

• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills

• Ability to lead incident resolution and drive service improvements under pressure

• Experience working in matrixed, cross-functional organisations

• Familiarity with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation

• Understanding of cloud security, compliance, and cost optimisation (FinOps)

• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and organisational skills

• Degree-level qualification (or equivalent experience); AWS certifications are advantageous

About us

We are DS Smith, together with International Paper, a global leader in sustainable packaging solutions and other fibre-based products. We believe a better, more sustainable tomorrow is possible with the right people who challenge and support one another to enact positive change.

We employ more than 60,000 colleagues across Europe, North America, and beyond, spanning innovation, manufacturing, design, sales, sustainability and more. Together with our customers, we make the world safer and more productive—one sustainable packaging solution at a time.

To fulfil our purpose of redefining packaging for a changing world, we aim to build a diverse, motivated and engaged workforce. We are committed to creating an inclusive culture where everyone feels valued and able to succeed.

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