Santander
Senior AWS Cloud Engineer | S4 | Data & AI Domain | Milton Keynes
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Senior AWS Cloud Engineer | S4 | Data & AI Domain | Milton Keynes
Country: United Kingdom
IT STARTS HERE
Santander (www.santander.com) is evolving from a global, high-impact brand into a technology-driven organisation, and our people are at the heart of this journey. Together, we are driving a customer-centric transformation that values bold thinking, innovation, and the courage to challenge what’s possible.
This is more than a strategic shift. It’s a chance for driven professionals to grow, learn, and make a real difference.
Our mission is to contribute to help more people and businesses prosper. We embrace a robust risk culture and all our professionals at all levels are expected to take a proactive and responsible approach toward risk management.
The Data & AI Domain at Santander is responsible for setting the strategic direction for data, analytics, and artificial intelligence across the organisation. It ensures that data is managed as a trusted enterprise asset and that advanced technologies are applied responsibly, securely, and effectively to create value for customers and the business.
THE DIFFERENCE YOU MAKE
The Data & AI Domain is looking for a Senior AWS Cloud Engineer based out of Milton Keynes.
In this role, you will be responsible for engineering, operating, and evolving the AWS data lake platform, including the cloud infrastructure, shared services, and data engineering applications that sit on top of it. You will work closely with data engineering, analytics, security, and architecture teams to ensure the platform is secure, resilient, cost-effective, and scalable, enabling teams to deliver data products safely and efficiently.
This is a hands-on engineering role, focused on building and running cloud platforms rather than line management.
The difference you’ll make:
- Engineering and operating the AWS data lake infrastructure, ensuring high availability, resilience, performance, and security
- Designing, building, and maintaining Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for AWS environments, shared services, and data platform components
- Managing and supporting data lake platform services and applications, including ingestion frameworks, processing engines, and access layers
- Implementing and maintaining cloud-native security controls, including IAM, encryption, network controls, and policy enforcement
- Supporting DevOps and platform automation, including CI/CD pipelines, environment provisioning, and release management
- Monitoring, tuning, and optimising platform performance, reliability, and cost, working within a FinOps-aligned operating model
- Providing operational support and engineering improvements for data lake workloads (batch, streaming, and interactive analytics)
- Working closely with data engineering and analytics teams to enable safe, repeatable deployment of data pipelines and applications
- Collaborating with enterprise architecture, security, and risk teams to ensure solutions align with group standards and regulatory expectations
- Contributing to platform standards, reference architectures, engineering patterns, and operational runbooks
We’re shaping the way we work through innovation, cutting-edge technology, collaboration, and the freedom to explore new ideas. To succeed in this role, you will be responsible for:
- The role holder will be responsible for their change and BAU budgets and will ensure that all delivery is managed to budget.
- Ensure all platform engineering activities are delivered in full compliance with regulatory requirements, the Santander Operational Risk Framework, and internal policies and standards.
- Proactively identify and address technology obsolescence and platform risks, working with technology peers to plan remediation, upgrades, and strategic retirement where appropriate.
- Engineer and operate platform capabilities that embed data policy requirements by design and implement technical controls and monitoring to surface non-compliance for timely resolution.
- Own the reliability, quality, and timely delivery of data lake platform services supporting Santander UK workloads.
- Collaborate closely with data engineering, security, and platform teams to enable effective end-to-end delivery across the data lake ecosystem and minimise friction between infrastructure and application layers.
- Partner with enterprise and data architecture to ensure cloud infrastructure, shared services, and data lake applications conform to approved group architectures and engineering standards.
- Develop a great understanding of how the data lake platform supports customer journeys and financial data flows, ensuring infrastructure and services are secure, resilient, and fit for purpose.
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WHAT YOU’LL BRING
Our people are our greatest strength. Every individual contributes unique perspectives that make us greater as a team and as an organisation. We’re enabling teams to go beyond by valuing who they are and empowering what they bring.
The following requirements represent the knowledge, skills, and abilities essential for success in this role. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
Professional Experience
- Very desirable is experience with Agentic AI in a ELT/ETL capacity (Preferred)
- Exposure to Kafka or streaming platforms from an infrastructure or operational perspective (Preferred)
- Experience with observability tooling (logging, metrics, alerting) for cloud platforms (Preferred)
- Understanding of FinOps, cost optimisation, and capacity management in AWS (Preferred)
- Familiarity with data governance tooling such as data catalogues or access control frameworks (Preferred)
- Experience working in Agile / product-aligned teams. Working knowledge of JIRA (Preferred)
- Minimum of seven (7) years of relevant experience demonstrating delivery expertise (Preferred)
Education
- Desirable AWS certification (e.g. AWS Solutions Architect – Associate/Professional, or AWS Data Engineer) (Preferred)
Languages
- English (Preferred)
- Spanish (Preferred)
Hard Skills
- Practical experience with AWS cloud architecture, including services like S3, IAM, VPC, KMS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Glue, Athena, EMR, Lambda, Step Functions, and SageMaker. (Preferred)
- Skilled in SQL and NoSQL databases for implementing data warehouses and data lakes. (Preferred)
- Experienced in data ingestion, processing, transformation, and delivery using batch, streaming, and real-time methods. (Preferred)
- Experience supporting Spark-based platforms (e.g. EMR, Glue, Databricks) (Preferred)
- Proficient with DevOps tools and practices (Git, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes) as well as ETL frameworks (Apache Spark, Airflow, AWS IoT Analytics/Device Management/Events). (Preferred)
- Programming expertise in Python, Java, Scala, SQL, Spark, Unix shell scripting, and AWS CLI. (Preferred)
- Great background in building and managing AWS platforms for analytics and data lake workloads, including application and framework management. (Preferred)
- Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK) and CI/CD tooling (Git, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CodePipeline). (Preferred)
- Solid understanding of cloud security—identity and access management, encryption, and network isolation. (Preferred)
- Supports batched, streaming, and near-real-time data workloads from platform and infrastructure perspectives. (Preferred)
- Confident operating platforms in regulated or controlled environments. (Preferred)
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Soft Skills
- Ability to influence Delivery Managers and technical leads without direct management control. (Preferred)
- Confident engaging senior stakeholders with clear, decision led updates. (Preferred)
- Skilled at balancing competing priorities and driving alignment. (Preferred)
- Comfortable challenging plans constructively and diplomatically. (Preferred)
WE VALUE YOUR IMPACT
At Santander, your contribution matters. We recognise the difference you make every day, and we make sure you feel valued, supported, and rewarded in return.
Here, recognition goes beyond pay. It’s about the pride you feel in your work, the impact you have on customers and communities, and the opportunities you have to grow and thrive — personally and professionally.
Salary Range:
£80,000.00 - £120,000.00 per annum (depending on experience)
This salary range represents the expected remuneration for the role. Annual salary is based on a standard 35-hour working week. Actual salary offered will depend on skills, experience, qualifications, and location.
Benefits:
- 30 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, which increases to 31 days after 5yrs service, with the option to purchase up to 5 contractual days per year
- £6,000 car allowance per year
- Company funded individual private medical insurance
- Protection for you and your family, with company-funded death-in-service benefit and income protection insurance, and the option to take advantage of discounted rates for additional life assurance and critical illness cover.
- Share in Santander’s success by saving or investing in our share plans.
- As a Santander UK employee, you are able to request staff versions of our products like our Edge Current Accounts and Credit Cards with no fees, as well as apply to many other deals and discounts in Santander products and services
- Competitive rewards that reflect the real impact you make and the value you bring.
- Wellbeing that goes beyond work — we work with a range of wellbeing partners across our 4 pillars of wellbeing (physical, mental, social and financial) to give you access to a suite of apps, discounted gym and fitness access, weekly online classes, flexible healthcare and mental health support.
- Support for every life stage — from menopause and pregnancy to parenthood and beyond, with enhanced family leave, childcare options and tailored wellbeing support.
- Time to give back through volunteering opportunities that let you make a difference in the communities we serve.
- Global growth opportunities to shape your career, learn new skills, and explore what’s possible across our international network.
Ready to be recognised? It starts with you.
LOCAL COMPLIANCE
At Santander, we’re proud to be an inclusive organisation that provides equal opportunities for everyone — regardless of age, gender, disability, civil status, race, religion, or sexual orientation.
We’re committed to creating a recruitment experience that’s accessible, fair, and welcoming
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