Principal CloudOps Engineer

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Cloud Operations Engineer to join our team in Barcelona. You’ll play a senior technical leadership role in designing, operating, and continuously improving the cloud infrastructure that underpins Sage HCM – our recently acquired HR and payroll platform (formerly Criterion), now expanding across North America, the UK, and Canada. The platform runs on AWS and you’ll join at an exciting early stage, going through a structured handover with the existing technical team. You’ll be expected to be highly autonomous and to quickly become the go-to cloud operations expert for the product. Whilst the role sits within a people-managed team, the technical direction of the cloud estate will be substantially yours to own. This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in our Barcelona office. First 90 days 30 Days: Gain a thorough understanding of the Sage HCM platform architecture and the existing cloud infrastructure. Begin the structured handover with the current technical contractors, meet your team and key cross-functional stakeholders, and familiarise yourself with Sage’s engineering standards and ways of working. 60 Days: Take active ownership of day-to-day cloud operations for the platform. Contribute to incident response, observability improvements, and cost optimisation initiatives. Begin identifying toil and automation opportunities, and start influencing the operational standards and SOPs for the product. 90 Days: Own the cloud operations strategy for Sage HCM end-to-end. Lead the completion of the contractor handover, establish robust platform standards, and act as the senior technical voice in architecture and product shaping discussions. Begin mentoring and upskilling engineers on the team. Meet the Team You’ll join a distributed Cloud Operations team spanning Barcelona, Newcastle, and beyond, working closely with engineering, product, and security colleagues across the globe. Your line manager is the Engineering Manager for Cloud Operations, who leads with a strong focus on autonomy and technical excellence. Given the acquisition context, you’ll also collaborate closely with contractors based in Eastern Europe during the initial handover period, before taking full ownership of the platform’s cloud infrastructure as a permanent team member. How Success Will Be Measured • Reliability, security, and performance of the Sage HCM cloud environment • Measurable reductions in operational toil through automation and tooling • Quality and completeness of platform documentation, SOPs, and runbooks • Speed and effectiveness of incident response and root cause resolution • Contribution to cost optimisation and total cost of ownership reduction • Thought leadership in DevOps/SRE culture and mentorship of engineers Skills You’ll Gain • Deep, hands-on knowledge of AWS cloud infrastructure at scale • Experience owning a cloud platform through a post-acquisition integration • Leadership experience driving DevOps and SRE culture across a global team • Advanced observability and incident management practices in a production environment • Cross-functional collaboration within a mature, agile product organisation