Lead Cloud Engineer · Lloyds Banking Group

Hi, I’m Sam.

Cloud & DevOps engineering leader with 6+ years automating cloud-native workloads across financial services, public sector, and retail.

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Sam Bird

About

I'm a Lead Cloud Engineer with over six years designing, automating, and operating cloud-native workloads across financial services, the public sector, and retail. AWS and Google Cloud certified, I bring deep expertise in DevOps practices, cloud infrastructure, and automation with tools like Terraform, Jenkins, and Python. I have a knack for turning manual, repetitive work into reliable automation, and I enjoy mentoring junior engineers and communicating clearly with both technical and non-technical teams. Key clients I've supported include Lloyds Banking Group, the UK Home Office, and the John Lewis Partnership.

Currently based in Leeds, United Kingdom.

Experience

A short tour through the places I’ve built platforms, automated delivery, and learned the most.

  1. Lloyds Banking Group

    Lead Cloud Engineer

    Lloyds Banking Group

    Nov 2023 — Present

    • Lead cloud engineering on the Economic Crime Intelligence data platform.
  2. Publicis Sapient

    Senior DevOps Consultant

    Publicis Sapient

    Apr 2022 — Nov 2023

    • Built automated deployment pipelines (Terraform, Jenkins, Helm) delivering applications to GCP for Lloyds Banking Group, enabling faster, more reliable releases.
    • Cut environment-provisioning pipeline runtime from 4 hours to 2 by analysing and documenting bottlenecks for the Platform Engineering team.
    • Led on-prem-to-GCP network design over dedicated Interconnect, and ran bi-weekly tech-talk sessions for 6+ months to embed CI/CD best practice.
    • Engaged through my own consultancy, Fregata Consulting (Director), founded to provide specialist Cloud & DevOps engineering.
  3. IBM

    DevOps Consultant → Senior DevOps Consultant

    IBM

    Mar 2019 — Apr 2022

    • Cut National Law Enforcement Data Programme deployments from half a day to under 30 minutes with parallel Jenkins release pipelines — now run multiple times a day across environments.
    • Built GCP Terraform modules integrated into Jenkins for Lloyds' new API management solution (Apigee X).
    • Identified up to 90% AWS hosting-cost savings using EC2 Spot instances; findings fed into the production architecture.
    • Refactored Jenkins pipeline code from 600 to 300 lines via a shared library, and mentored across five Scrum teams.
  4. John Lewis & Partners

    Technology Graduate

    John Lewis & Partners

    Sep 2016 — Mar 2019

    • Reduced platform-onboarding Google Group creation from a one-week process to under 5 minutes by automating Google APIs with Python in GitLab CI.
    • Built tier-based GCP pipelines (Terraform, Kubernetes) for faster delivery, and added Prometheus observability via a custom NGINX base image.
    • Rotated across seven roles — from Business Intelligence and iOS development to DevOps — across the John Lewis and Waitrose brands.
  5. Sage

    Undergraduate Software Engineer

    Sage

    Sep 2014 — Aug 2015

    • Maintained Sage UK&I's subscription sales systems, resolving live issues for internal and external customers.
    • Designed and built a rollback tool to correct mis-applied subscription changes, helping Finance issue timely customer refunds.

Skills

Where I spend my time, both in the org chart and at the keyboard.

Cloud & Containers

  • AWS
  • Google Cloud
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Helm

Infrastructure as Code

  • Terraform
  • Vault

CI/CD & Automation

  • Jenkins
  • GitLab CI
  • GitHub
  • Python
  • Groovy
  • Gradle

Observability & Quality

  • Prometheus
  • Dynatrace
  • SonarQube
  • Nexus

Get in touch

Always happy to chat about cloud engineering, DevOps, or automation. The fastest way to reach me is email.