Senior Cloud Operations Specialist

Let's Write Africa's Story Together! Old Mutual is a firm believer in the African opportunity and our diverse talent reflects this. Job Description The Senior Cloud Operations Specialist is responsible for managing and maintaining Old Mutual's cloud infrastructure, ensuring high availability, performance, and security. The role is primarily operational in nature - focused on monitoring, incident response, system maintenance, patching, and the reliable day-to-day running of cloud platforms and shared services. A key and ongoing responsibility of this role is cloud cost management and FinOps practice. Cloud Operations Specialists are the primary owners of day-to-day spend visibility, waste identification, rightsizing, and cost reporting. Optimising cloud spend is not a periodic task - it is a continuous operational discipline embedded in the daily and weekly rhythm of the role. This role additionally carries formal people management responsibility, leading the Cloud Operations team, managing team performance and development and acting as the senior escalation point for operational issues. RESPONSIBILITIES Infrastructure Operations & Availability Manage and maintain cloud infrastructure to ensure high availability, performance, and security. Assist in the deployment, configuration, and management of cloud resources in line with engineering-defined standards. Perform regular system maintenance, updates, backups, and patching to keep cloud environments secure and up-to-date. Manage infrastructure availability, resilience, and disaster recovery procedures. Monitoring & Capacity Management Monitor cloud systems and services to ensure optimal performance. Implement and manage monitoring systems and monitoring reporting in line with engineering-defined requirements. Monitor, report, and manage cloud platform and shared services capacity. Optimize cloud resource usage and costs, providing recommendations for improvements. Monitor cost and usage dashboards daily; identify anomalies, unexpected spend spikes, or untagged resources and escalate or remediate promptly. Incident Management & Support Respond to and resolve cloud-related incidents and service requests per SLA. Participate in on-call rotations to provide 24/7 support for critical cloud operations. Perform Tier-2 troubleshooting and escalate complex or recurring issues to Cloud Engineering for root cause analysis and remediation. Collaborate with development and engineering teams to support cloud-based applications and services. FinOps & Cloud Cost Optimisation Contribute to cloud cost visibility tooling and dashboards (e.g. AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing, Custom Implementations), ensuring spend is accurately tagged and attributable to teams, products, and environments. Perform regular (at minimum once per sprint) reviews of cloud spend to identify waste, idle resources, oversized instances, unattached storage, and unused reservations. Execute rightsizing recommendations generated by cloud-native tooling and engineering - resize, downgrade, or terminate resources within agreed operational parameters. Consult on Reserved Instance / Savings Plan / Committed Use Discount coverage, flagging expiries and utilization gaps to FinOps and management. Enforce and monitor resource tagging compliance; identify and remediate untagged or incorrectly tagged resources using automation tooling provided by engineering. Consult and operate automated cost governance policies (budget alerts, anomaly detection rules, resource lifecycle schedules such as start/stop automation). Identify and implement quick-win cost reduction opportunities (e.g. storage tier transitions, snapshot cleanup, log retention enforcement) within operational authority. Contribute operational context and findings to quarterly FinOps reviews and cost deep-dives. Collaborate with Cloud Engineering to escalate architectural cost drivers that require design changes beyond operational remediation. Automation & Operational Scripting Operate and execute automation tooling and IaC workflows authored and maintained by Cloud Engineers. Write and maintain operational scripts (Terraform, Python, Bash, or PowerShell) to support day-to-day maintenance, remediation, and reporting tasks. Contribute improvements to runbooks and operational automation, working in partnership with engineering for any changes to production IaC or platform tooling. Governance, Security & Compliance Ensure compliance with security policies, organizational governance standards, and industry regulations. Perform access reviews, security patching, and policy compliance checks within cloud environments. Documentation & Continuous Improvement Develop and maintain documentation for cloud operations processes, runbooks, and procedures. Identify and communicate operational improvement opportunities to Cloud Engineering. Participate in post-incident reviews and contribute to continuous improvement initiatives. Team Leadership Lead and manage the Cloud Operations team, including performance management, coaching, and professional development. Act as the senior escalation point for complex or high-impact operational issues. Engage stakeholders on operational status, capacity, and improvement initiatives. Drive operational maturity and process improvement across the cloud ops function. Report on team performance, SLA adherence, incident trends, and cloud health to senior leadership. Minimum Requirements: A numerate Bachelor's Degree (e.g. Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering) with minimum or equivalent technical qualification. 6 years of professional experience, including 2 years' people management experience. Relevant cloud certification. Technical Experience requirements: Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google DevOps Cloud Operations practices Problem solving and trouble shooting skills Infrastructure as code (Eg, Terraform, CloudFormation) Cloud security Cloud Networking Agile/SAFe Coding and scripting (Eg. Python, Bash, Powershell) Scripting and Automation (Eg. Python, Bash, Powershell) Cloud Monitoring Cloud Compliance Skills Adaptive Thinking, Change Management, Cloud Computing, Cloud Infrastructure Management, Computer Network Security, Cost Account Management, Cost Budgeting, Data Analysis, Data Collection Methods, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), IT Network Security, Performance Improvements, Project Integration Management, Project Life Cycle Management, System Architecture Analysis, System Requirements Analysis, Virtualization, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) Competencies Education NQF Level 7 - Degree, Advance Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate or equivalent Closing Date 21 March 2026 , 23:59 The appointment will be made from the designated group in line with the Employment Equity Plan of Old Mutual South Africa and the specific business unit in question. The Old Mutual Story! Old Mutual is a premium African financial services organisation that offers a broad spectrum of financial solutions to retail and corporate customers across key market segments in 14 countries. The lines of business include Life and Savings, Property and Casualty, Asset Management and Banking and Lending. We are rooted in our purpose of Championing Mutually Positive Futures Every Day and believe that a great customer experience is anchored in a great employee experience.