Lead Cloud Engineer

Rapha launched in 2004 to redefine cycling apparel. Today progressive design and storytelling has built a global movement.

We love cycling in all its forms, from the city streets to the highest peaks. And we know its power to transform lives. Led by innovation, we embody this love through a dedication to the world's greatest sport, by setting a new standard in design and pushing the cutting edge of performance and human craft.

The Role 

We’re seeking a highly skilled Lead Cloud Engineer to drive the evolution of our cloud infrastructure, enabling our teams to scale rapidly with high reliability, security, and efficiency. You’ll lead architectural decisions, define and enforce best practices, and own testing strategy across our event-driven, serverless-first platform. This is a strategic and hands-on role at the heart of our composable commerce and MACH-aligned engineering function. Key responsibilities include:

• Oversee and shape the technical stack, ensuring it evolves with our needs.
• Lead the design, implementation and optimisation of high-quality, event-driven cloud services. 
• Define and enforce best practices for IaC, CI/CD, monitoring, and cost management. 
• Support and lead platform-wide initiatives to reduce toil, improve observability, and increase deployment velocity.
• Guide and own architectural decisions across services and systems. 
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure readiness for scale and resilience. 
• Build and mentor a high-performing team, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. 
• Embed security, compliance, and incident response best practices into cloud workflows.
• Ensure system reliability and performance through proactive engineering practices.
• Partner with stakeholders to streamline developer experience — including onboarding, tooling, and documentation.

The Candidate

Essential

• Proven experience designing and operating cloud infrastructure at scale (AWS preferred).
• Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred).
• Strong working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.).
• Solid experience with modern infrastructure patterns such as - serverless, event-driven architecture, container orchestration.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native testing strategies and quality automation.
• Experience leading engineering initiatives that improve reliability, scalability, and delivery velocity.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence and collaborate across teams.

Desirable

• Familiarity with MACH principles and composable commerce ecosystems.
• Exposure to observability platforms (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience with other cloud providers (GCP, Azure) and DevOps tooling.
• Background in building internal platforms or developer experience tooling.

Working at Rapha

We are continuously looking into ways to invest in our employees and build a better working culture and environment. Here are just some of the internal benefits we offer:

• Flexible working hours
• In person, collaborative culture - minimum 4 days in office
• Free barista coffee and social drinks in the office
• Monthly department social events and quarterly office social away days
• We offer a flexible riding benefit to allow you to go out riding on a Wednesday morning with colleagues or learn to cycle to cycling through our Getting Started Scheme.
• We offer all our employees a 50% apparel discount and a discount for family and friends
• An annual clothing allowance
• Free membership to the Rapha Cycling Club
• Company Pension Scheme
• Enhanced Parental Leave and Pay