Cloud Operations Specialist at Old Mutual

Job Description

• The 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.
• Cloud Operations Specialists work closely with Cloud Engineers, consuming and extending the automation tooling and infrastructure built by engineering teams. They are expected to write and maintain operational scripts to support their work, but their primary output is stable, well-operated cloud environments rather than the delivery of new features or platform capabilities. 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

Key responsibilities will include amongst others:

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.
• Continuously monitor infrastructure, applications, and services using enterprise monitoring tools (e.g. Dynatrace, CloudWatch, Grafana).
• Identify anomalies, performance degradation, and failures, and initiate corrective actions.
• Morning health checks for core Wealth applications.

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

• Cloud cost optimisation is a core, ongoing operational responsibility — not an ad hoc or quarterly activity. Cloud Operations Specialists are expected to actively manage and reduce cloud spend as part of their regular work.
• 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.

Batch Process Management

• Monitor and manage scheduled batch processes using enterprise job scheduling tools (e.g. Dollar Universe, Control-M).
• Ensure successful completion of batch cycles and investigate failures to minimise business impact.

Faults Diagnosis and Correction

• Perform initial fault isolation and troubleshooting using established runbooks and known fixes.
• Restore services where possible or escalate to the appropriate on-call support teams.

Incident Detection and Escalation

• Log, track, and manage incidents using approved ITSM tools (e.g. ServiceNow, Jira).
• Ensure incidents are escalated promptly in line with SLA and severity guidelines.

Documentation and Backup

• 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.

Knowledge Management System

• Utilise and contribute to knowledge bases to improve resolution times and reduce repeat incidents.
• Share insights and improvements with broader IT Operations teams.

Operational Compliance

• Ensure all activities adhere to IT policies, security standards, and regulatory requirements.
• Identify and escalate instances of non-compliance or operational risk.

Personal Capability Building

• Develop own capabilities by participating in assessment and development planning activities as well as formal and informal training and coaching.
• Develop and maintain an understanding of relevant technology, external regulation, and industry best practices through ongoing education, attending conferences, and reading specialist media.

These responsibilities offer an overview and a general outline of the role and are not exhaustive.

Qualifications and Experience required:

• Matric (NSC)
• NQF Level 5 - Higher, Advance or Occupational Certificate or equivalent.

2-4 years’ experience in:

• IT Operations / Production Support
• Batch processing environments
• Monitoring and alerting systems

Technical Exposure:

• Job scheduling tools (e.g. Dollar Universe, Control-M or other scheduling tools)
• Monitoring tools (Dynatrace, CloudWatch, Grafana)
• ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Jira)
• Cloud platforms (AWS and or Azure)
• Linux / Windows server environment management
• Database management (SQL and or Oracle)
• Deployments

Other Requirements:

• Willingness to work after hours and or weekends as and when required.
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervision.

Skills

• Adaptive Thinking, Change Management, Change Process Management, Cloud skill Accountability, Cloud skill Business Insights, Cloud skill Complexity Management, Cultivates Innovation, Current State Analysis, Data Compilation, Enterprise Readiness Assessment, IT Network Security, Performance Gap Analysis, Plans and Aligns, Policy Development, Project Integration Management, Project Life Cycle Management, Strategic Planning

Education

• NQF Level 5 - Higher, Advance or Occupational Certificate or equivalent  (Required)

Closing Date

• 16 July 2026