Apto Solutions
Pembroke Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 3BA, UK
Who this is for
An early-career engineering role inside Operate, our managed service. Security or observability background — either is welcome.
You have been working for eighteen months to three years in a hands-on technical role — a platform team, a SOC or security engineering team, an MSP or MSSP, an infrastructure or DevOps team, a vendor’s support or professional services desk — and you are looking for your first move. You have had your hands on something that runs in production and matters to somebody. You want to go deeper, faster, in a smaller business where the work you do is seen. This is not a graduate scheme and it is not a helpdesk. It is a real engineering seat with real customers, real supervision and a clear path up.
The Role
This is a hands-on engineering role inside Operate, our managed service. You will help run customer telemetry platforms day to day, improve them, and contribute to the platform that lets us run them well. You will do this as part of a small engineering pool, with a senior engineer checking your work before it reaches a customer and a line manager who is accountable for your development.
Operate has two shapes and you will work in both.
Operate Core is always-on. It is continuous ownership of a customer’s platform — health, ingestion, data quality, alerting, upgrades, capacity. There is no handover and no final deliverable. The platform is ours to keep healthy for as long as the customer is ours. Success is measured in the absence of surprises and in the platform being demonstrably better in six months than it is today.
Operate Attach is sprint-based improvement. A customer has a defined problem — noisy alerts, a data source that will not normalise, ingest costs running away, a detection gap, a migration — and we take a scoped block of work and fix it. Attach has a start, a shape and an end. It sits on top of Core, for the same customers, with the same engineers.
Alongside that you will take a share of professional services delivery: shorter, project-shaped engagements that are usually how a customer first meets us.
What You’ll do
Everything below is done with supervision at first and with increasing independence as you show you can carry it. We will be explicit with you about where that line is and how it moves.
Day-to-day health of customer platforms.
Ingestion pipelines, data quality, alerting, licensing and capacity, upgrades and patching. You will start by owning a slice of a named customer estate, and you will be expected to notice problems before the customer does.
Incident and problem work.
Triage, diagnosis and resolution — and then the harder part, which is the root cause and the permanent fix so it does not come back.
Content and configuration.
Detections, dashboards, parsers, normalisation, alert rules, pipeline routing — built properly, peer reviewed, version controlled, documented.
Attach sprints and PS work.
Taking a defined piece of a scoped improvement, delivering it, and being able to show what changed.
Automation.
If you do something manually three times, we expect you to want to automate the fourth. Most of our platform tooling started as an engineer being annoyed by something.
Documentation and runbooks.
Your own, to a standard, every time. Undocumented work is unfinished work.
What this role is NOT
Being clear about this matters as much as the role definition itself.
It is not a SOC analyst seat.
You are not sitting in a queue triaging alerts against someone else’s runbook. You help build and run the platform that the analysts depend on.
It is not a service desk or first-line support role.
You will talk to customers about technical matters, but the work is engineering, not ticket handling.
It is not a data science role.
We work with very large volumes of machine data, but the work is systems and operations engineering, not modelling or statistics. Python and dashboards are not the same thing as running a platform.
It is not a graduate scheme.
We paused our graduate hire to open this role instead, because we want someone who has already spent time in a production environment and knows what it feels like when something breaks at an awkward hour.
It is not a project role with a finish line.
Core has no end date. If what you enjoy is shipping a thing and walking away, you will find the continuous half of this job frustrating.
Who we are looking for
We are indifferent to whether your background is security or observability. Either one is a good starting point, and the interesting work at Apto sits where the two meet — the same telemetry usually has to serve both a security question and an operational one. What we need is depth in one and genuine curiosity about the other
Experience we’re looking for
Roughly eighteen months to three years in a hands-on technical role. We care much more about what you have actually done than about the number of months attached to it, and we know that at this stage most of what you have done was somebody else’s decision. That is fine. We are looking for the shape of it.
You have had your hands on a telemetry, SIEM, observability or monitoring platform that was running in production — not only in a course or a home lab. You have onboarded a data source, tuned an alert, applied an upgrade, or been the person who had to work out why the data stopped arriving.
You have carried something over time rather than only delivering a task and moving on — a set of alerts you looked after, a customer estate you knew well, an on-call rotation, a service that was yours to keep healthy.
You are comfortable in Linux, in at least one query language, and you have written scripts that did something useful. Python is what we mostly use; anything credible is a fine starting point.
You have automated or fixed something real and you can show it. A script, a repo, a before-and-after number, a description concrete enough for us to ask sensible questions about.
You can write. A clear runbook, a readable incident note, a straight message to a customer. This is a customer-facing role.
You have worked in at least one of our vendor families — Splunk, Cribl, Sentinel, Grafana, Datadog, Elastic, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry — or a close analogue. The specific product is negotiable. Real exposure is not.
If you meet most of this and not all of it, apply anyway and tell us which parts you do not have. We would rather read an honest gap than a padded CV.
The platform work – why this is interesting
Most managed service jobs are the same job with a different logo on the ticketing system. This one is not, because we are building our own platform underneath the service and you will work on it. We have replaced a vendor-licensed telemetry backend with an open-source stack we run ourselves. A base platform (secret ;-)) On top of that sits multi-vendor collection — the pattern that lets us onboard a Splunk, a Cribl or a Sentinel customer without rebuilding it from scratch each time. Beyond that, the vendors are all shipping AI and agentic layers — MCP servers, agentic investigation, cross-vendor gateways — and we already have that work live with a customer. You will get early, hands-on exposure to it while most of the industry is still writing slide decks about it.
Who this is for
An early-career engineering role inside Operate, our managed service. Security or observability background — either is welcome.
You have been working for eighteen months to three years in a hands-on technical role — a platform team, a SOC or security engineering team, an MSP or MSSP, an infrastructure or DevOps team, a vendor’s support or professional services desk — and you are looking for your first move. You have had your hands on something that runs in production and matters to somebody. You want to go deeper, faster, in a smaller business where the work you do is seen. This is not a graduate scheme and it is not a helpdesk. It is a real engineering seat with real customers, real supervision and a clear path up.
The Role
This is a hands-on engineering role inside Operate, our managed service. You will help run customer telemetry platforms day to day, improve them, and contribute to the platform that lets us run them well. You will do this as part of a small engineering pool, with a senior engineer checking your work before it reaches a customer and a line manager who is accountable for your development.
Operate has two shapes and you will work in both.
Operate Core is always-on. It is continuous ownership of a customer’s platform — health, ingestion, data quality, alerting, upgrades, capacity. There is no handover and no final deliverable. The platform is ours to keep healthy for as long as the customer is ours. Success is measured in the absence of surprises and in the platform being demonstrably better in six months than it is today.
Operate Attach is sprint-based improvement. A customer has a defined problem — noisy alerts, a data source that will not normalise, ingest costs running away, a detection gap, a migration — and we take a scoped block of work and fix it. Attach has a start, a shape and an end. It sits on top of Core, for the same customers, with the same engineers.
Alongside that you will take a share of professional services delivery: shorter, project-shaped engagements that are usually how a customer first meets us.
What You’ll do
Everything below is done with supervision at first and with increasing independence as you show you can carry it. We will be explicit with you about where that line is and how it moves.
Day-to-day health of customer platforms.
Ingestion pipelines, data quality, alerting, licensing and capacity, upgrades and patching. You will start by owning a slice of a named customer estate, and you will be expected to notice problems before the customer does.
Incident and problem work.
Triage, diagnosis and resolution — and then the harder part, which is the root cause and the permanent fix so it does not come back.
Content and configuration.
Detections, dashboards, parsers, normalisation, alert rules, pipeline routing — built properly, peer reviewed, version controlled, documented.
Attach sprints and PS work.
Taking a defined piece of a scoped improvement, delivering it, and being able to show what changed.
Automation.
If you do something manually three times, we expect you to want to automate the fourth. Most of our platform tooling started as an engineer being annoyed by something.
Documentation and runbooks.
Your own, to a standard, every time. Undocumented work is unfinished work.
What this role is NOT
Being clear about this matters as much as the role definition itself.
It is not a SOC analyst seat.
You are not sitting in a queue triaging alerts against someone else’s runbook. You help build and run the platform that the analysts depend on.
It is not a service desk or first-line support role.
You will talk to customers about technical matters, but the work is engineering, not ticket handling.
It is not a data science role.
We work with very large volumes of machine data, but the work is systems and operations engineering, not modelling or statistics. Python and dashboards are not the same thing as running a platform.
It is not a graduate scheme.
We paused our graduate hire to open this role instead, because we want someone who has already spent time in a production environment and knows what it feels like when something breaks at an awkward hour.
It is not a project role with a finish line.
Core has no end date. If what you enjoy is shipping a thing and walking away, you will find the continuous half of this job frustrating.
Who we are looking for
We are indifferent to whether your background is security or observability. Either one is a good starting point, and the interesting work at Apto sits where the two meet — the same telemetry usually has to serve both a security question and an operational one. What we need is depth in one and genuine curiosity about the other
Experience we’re looking for
Roughly eighteen months to three years in a hands-on technical role. We care much more about what you have actually done than about the number of months attached to it, and we know that at this stage most of what you have done was somebody else’s decision. That is fine. We are looking for the shape of it.
You have had your hands on a telemetry, SIEM, observability or monitoring platform that was running in production — not only in a course or a home lab. You have onboarded a data source, tuned an alert, applied an upgrade, or been the person who had to work out why the data stopped arriving.
You have carried something over time rather than only delivering a task and moving on — a set of alerts you looked after, a customer estate you knew well, an on-call rotation, a service that was yours to keep healthy.
You are comfortable in Linux, in at least one query language, and you have written scripts that did something useful. Python is what we mostly use; anything credible is a fine starting point.
You have automated or fixed something real and you can show it. A script, a repo, a before-and-after number, a description concrete enough for us to ask sensible questions about.
You can write. A clear runbook, a readable incident note, a straight message to a customer. This is a customer-facing role.
You have worked in at least one of our vendor families — Splunk, Cribl, Sentinel, Grafana, Datadog, Elastic, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry — or a close analogue. The specific product is negotiable. Real exposure is not.
If you meet most of this and not all of it, apply anyway and tell us which parts you do not have. We would rather read an honest gap than a padded CV.
The platform work – why this is interesting
Most managed service jobs are the same job with a different logo on the ticketing system. This one is not, because we are building our own platform underneath the service and you will work on it. We have replaced a vendor-licensed telemetry backend with an open-source stack we run ourselves. A base platform (secret ;-)) On top of that sits multi-vendor collection — the pattern that lets us onboard a Splunk, a Cribl or a Sentinel customer without rebuilding it from scratch each time. Beyond that, the vendors are all shipping AI and agentic layers — MCP servers, agentic investigation, cross-vendor gateways — and we already have that work live with a customer. You will get early, hands-on exposure to it while most of the industry is still writing slide decks about it.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Cambridge, UK
Solution Architect
Salary: £54,800 - £73,250
Location: Hybrid Cambridge with 40-60% time in office
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full time 35 hours week
Do you want to design the next generation of cloud-native solutions that support millions of users around the world? Are you excited by solving complex technology challenges, influencing strategic programmes, and delivering secure, resilient applications on AWS?
Join us and help shape the future of our technology landscape while making a meaningful global impact.
We are Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a world-leading academic publisher and assessment organisation and a proud part of the University of Cambridge.
We are seeking a highly motivated Solution Architect to join our English Enterprise Architecture team. In this influential role, you will contribute to large-scale technology transformation programmes and help deliver the technology strategy that underpins our English product portfolio.
Working across the architecture community, you will partner closely with product, engineering, and technology teams to design, assure, and govern secure, resilient, and scalable platforms. You will ensure technology solutions align with business objectives and deliver measurable value for learners, educators, and partners around the world.
About the role
As part of this role, you'll design and deliver secure, scalable, and resilient cloud-native solutions on AWS that enable strategic business outcomes. Working closely with Enterprise Architects, engineering teams, product managers, and security specialists, you'll shape solution architectures that align with our technology strategy while driving innovation, modern engineering practices, and the successful delivery of transformational initiatives.
You will be joining a team of passionate solution and enterprise architects who are committed to delivering high-quality digital platforms, evolving our architecture practice, and enabling technology that creates lasting business value.
The role includes:
Collaborating with business and technology stakeholders to understand requirements, establish trusted relationships, and translate business needs into solution architectures (Collaboration).
Designing secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective cloud-native solutions on AWS that align with enterprise architecture principles, technology standards, and strategic roadmaps (Innovation).
Working closely with engineers, technical leads, security, platform, and operations teams to ensure solutions are delivered using modern engineering practices and architectural best practice (Empowerment).
Producing and maintaining solution architecture artefacts, architecture decision records, and technical designs, while governing architectural integrity throughout the delivery lifecycle (Responsibility).
Identifying and managing architectural risks, technical debt, and technology trade-offs to enable informed decision-making and successful programme delivery (Responsibility).
Contributing to the continuous improvement of architecture standards, reusable patterns, governance, and cloud engineering practices across the organisation (Innovation).
Providing technical leadership, mentoring architects and engineering teams, and fostering a culture of collaboration, continuous learning, and architectural excellence (Responsibility).
This position has been classified as a hybrid role, requiring the selected candidate to typically spend 40-60% of their time collaborating and connecting face-to-face at their dedicated location. Aside from our hybrid principles, other flexible working requests will be considered from the first day of employment, including other work arrangements should you require adjustments due to a disability or long-term health condition.
About You
We are looking for a highly motivated and enthusiastic individual who enjoys challenging the status quo and looking for innovative ways to solve complicated problems.
You will need strong communication skills to build trust with stakeholders across the English product group and allow you to influence decision makers to endorse your ideas.
You will have experience of teasing out architecturally significant requirements and designing solutions using techniques such as modelling and diagramming to communicate your ideas.
Experience with AWS architecture patterns, including microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, serverless computing, containers, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
You will need a robust understanding of event driven architecture design, data products, microservices and exposure to modern development techniques.
If you would like to know more about this opportunity and what will make you successful, please see the full job description attached to the bottom of this vacancy on our careers site.
If you meet the above minimum requirements, we encourage you to apply. Your application will be even stronger if you can also demonstrate the following desirable criteria:
You are an experienced AWS expert with a proven track record of designing and delivering secure, scalable and resilient cloud-native solutions on AWS within complex enterprise environments.
Knowledge of authentication and authorisation protocols, including OpenID Connect (OIDC) and OAuth 2.0, alongside cloud security design principles.
You enjoy solving complex business and technology challenges, balancing strategic thinking with pragmatic decision-making.
You are curious, collaborative and motivated by delivering technology that solves real customer problems.
You are an excellent communicator who can explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Excellent problem-solving, analytical thinking, and decision-making capabilities.
Strong leadership, communication, influencing, and stakeholder management skills
For a detailed job description, please refer to the link at the bottom of the advert on our careers site.
We are a Disability Confident (DC) employer that is committed to equality and inclusion ensuring our recruitment process is accessible to all. The DC scheme's Offer of an Interview commitment applies to applicants who opt in, and disclose a disability or a long-term health condition, and who best meet the minimum criteria for the role. In instances where interviewing all qualifying candidates is not practicable and/or appropriate, we prioritise those who best meet the minimum criteria, as we would for applicants who do not have a disability or long-term health condition.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment is an approved UK employer for the sponsorship of eligible roles and applicants under the Skilled Worker visa route. Please refer to the gov.uk website for guidance to understand your own eligibility based on the role you are applying for.
Rewards and benefits
We will support you to be at your best in work and to live well outside of it. In addition to competitive salaries, we offer a world-class, flexible rewards package , featuring family-friendly and planet-friendly benefits including:
28 days annual leave plus bank holidays
Private medical and Permanent Health Insurance
Discretionary annual bonus
Group personal pension scheme
Life assurance up to 4 x annual salary
Green travel schemes
Ready to pursue your potential? Apply now.
We aim to support candidates by making our interview process clear and transparent. The closing date for all applications will be 23rd October . We will review applications on an ongoing basis, and shortlisted candidates can expect interviews to take place shortly after.
Please expect as part if the application, 3 questions to answer at application stage with CV then if you are shortlisted and progressed through the stages, you can expect:
First-stage 30 minute interview via Microsoft Teams
Second-stage face-to-face interview focused on technical and soft skills.
Third-stage meeting with the Director of department
If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process due to a disability or a long-term health condition, there will be an opportunity for you to inform us via the online application form. We will do our best to accommodate your needs.
Please note that successful applicants will be subject to satisfactory background checks including DBS due to working in a regulated industry.
We are committed to an equitable recruitment process. As such, applications must be submitted via our official online application procedure. Please refrain from sending your CV directly to our recruiters. If you experience technical difficulties or require additional support with submitting your online application, contact the Recruiter.
Why join us
Joining us is your opportunity to pursue potential. You will belong to a collaborative team that is exploring new and better ways to serve students, teachers and researchers across the globe – for the benefit of individuals, society and the world. Sharing our mission will inspire your own growth, development and progress, in an environment which embraces difference, change and aspiration.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment is committed to being a place where anyone can enjoy a successful career, where it is safe to speak up, and where we learn continuously to improve together. We welcome applications from all candidates, regardless of demographic characteristics (age, disability, educational attainment, ethnicity, gender, marital status, neurodiversity, religion, sex, gender identity and sexual identity), cultural, or social class/background.
We believe better outcomes come through diversity of thought, background and approach. We welcome applications from people from all backgrounds and communities, actively seeking to employ people from a wide range of different communities.
Solution Architect
Salary: £54,800 - £73,250
Location: Hybrid Cambridge with 40-60% time in office
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full time 35 hours week
Do you want to design the next generation of cloud-native solutions that support millions of users around the world? Are you excited by solving complex technology challenges, influencing strategic programmes, and delivering secure, resilient applications on AWS?
Join us and help shape the future of our technology landscape while making a meaningful global impact.
We are Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a world-leading academic publisher and assessment organisation and a proud part of the University of Cambridge.
We are seeking a highly motivated Solution Architect to join our English Enterprise Architecture team. In this influential role, you will contribute to large-scale technology transformation programmes and help deliver the technology strategy that underpins our English product portfolio.
Working across the architecture community, you will partner closely with product, engineering, and technology teams to design, assure, and govern secure, resilient, and scalable platforms. You will ensure technology solutions align with business objectives and deliver measurable value for learners, educators, and partners around the world.
About the role
As part of this role, you'll design and deliver secure, scalable, and resilient cloud-native solutions on AWS that enable strategic business outcomes. Working closely with Enterprise Architects, engineering teams, product managers, and security specialists, you'll shape solution architectures that align with our technology strategy while driving innovation, modern engineering practices, and the successful delivery of transformational initiatives.
You will be joining a team of passionate solution and enterprise architects who are committed to delivering high-quality digital platforms, evolving our architecture practice, and enabling technology that creates lasting business value.
The role includes:
Collaborating with business and technology stakeholders to understand requirements, establish trusted relationships, and translate business needs into solution architectures (Collaboration).
Designing secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective cloud-native solutions on AWS that align with enterprise architecture principles, technology standards, and strategic roadmaps (Innovation).
Working closely with engineers, technical leads, security, platform, and operations teams to ensure solutions are delivered using modern engineering practices and architectural best practice (Empowerment).
Producing and maintaining solution architecture artefacts, architecture decision records, and technical designs, while governing architectural integrity throughout the delivery lifecycle (Responsibility).
Identifying and managing architectural risks, technical debt, and technology trade-offs to enable informed decision-making and successful programme delivery (Responsibility).
Contributing to the continuous improvement of architecture standards, reusable patterns, governance, and cloud engineering practices across the organisation (Innovation).
Providing technical leadership, mentoring architects and engineering teams, and fostering a culture of collaboration, continuous learning, and architectural excellence (Responsibility).
This position has been classified as a hybrid role, requiring the selected candidate to typically spend 40-60% of their time collaborating and connecting face-to-face at their dedicated location. Aside from our hybrid principles, other flexible working requests will be considered from the first day of employment, including other work arrangements should you require adjustments due to a disability or long-term health condition.
About You
We are looking for a highly motivated and enthusiastic individual who enjoys challenging the status quo and looking for innovative ways to solve complicated problems.
You will need strong communication skills to build trust with stakeholders across the English product group and allow you to influence decision makers to endorse your ideas.
You will have experience of teasing out architecturally significant requirements and designing solutions using techniques such as modelling and diagramming to communicate your ideas.
Experience with AWS architecture patterns, including microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, serverless computing, containers, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
You will need a robust understanding of event driven architecture design, data products, microservices and exposure to modern development techniques.
If you would like to know more about this opportunity and what will make you successful, please see the full job description attached to the bottom of this vacancy on our careers site.
If you meet the above minimum requirements, we encourage you to apply. Your application will be even stronger if you can also demonstrate the following desirable criteria:
You are an experienced AWS expert with a proven track record of designing and delivering secure, scalable and resilient cloud-native solutions on AWS within complex enterprise environments.
Knowledge of authentication and authorisation protocols, including OpenID Connect (OIDC) and OAuth 2.0, alongside cloud security design principles.
You enjoy solving complex business and technology challenges, balancing strategic thinking with pragmatic decision-making.
You are curious, collaborative and motivated by delivering technology that solves real customer problems.
You are an excellent communicator who can explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Excellent problem-solving, analytical thinking, and decision-making capabilities.
Strong leadership, communication, influencing, and stakeholder management skills
For a detailed job description, please refer to the link at the bottom of the advert on our careers site.
We are a Disability Confident (DC) employer that is committed to equality and inclusion ensuring our recruitment process is accessible to all. The DC scheme's Offer of an Interview commitment applies to applicants who opt in, and disclose a disability or a long-term health condition, and who best meet the minimum criteria for the role. In instances where interviewing all qualifying candidates is not practicable and/or appropriate, we prioritise those who best meet the minimum criteria, as we would for applicants who do not have a disability or long-term health condition.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment is an approved UK employer for the sponsorship of eligible roles and applicants under the Skilled Worker visa route. Please refer to the gov.uk website for guidance to understand your own eligibility based on the role you are applying for.
Rewards and benefits
We will support you to be at your best in work and to live well outside of it. In addition to competitive salaries, we offer a world-class, flexible rewards package , featuring family-friendly and planet-friendly benefits including:
28 days annual leave plus bank holidays
Private medical and Permanent Health Insurance
Discretionary annual bonus
Group personal pension scheme
Life assurance up to 4 x annual salary
Green travel schemes
Ready to pursue your potential? Apply now.
We aim to support candidates by making our interview process clear and transparent. The closing date for all applications will be 23rd October . We will review applications on an ongoing basis, and shortlisted candidates can expect interviews to take place shortly after.
Please expect as part if the application, 3 questions to answer at application stage with CV then if you are shortlisted and progressed through the stages, you can expect:
First-stage 30 minute interview via Microsoft Teams
Second-stage face-to-face interview focused on technical and soft skills.
Third-stage meeting with the Director of department
If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process due to a disability or a long-term health condition, there will be an opportunity for you to inform us via the online application form. We will do our best to accommodate your needs.
Please note that successful applicants will be subject to satisfactory background checks including DBS due to working in a regulated industry.
We are committed to an equitable recruitment process. As such, applications must be submitted via our official online application procedure. Please refrain from sending your CV directly to our recruiters. If you experience technical difficulties or require additional support with submitting your online application, contact the Recruiter.
Why join us
Joining us is your opportunity to pursue potential. You will belong to a collaborative team that is exploring new and better ways to serve students, teachers and researchers across the globe – for the benefit of individuals, society and the world. Sharing our mission will inspire your own growth, development and progress, in an environment which embraces difference, change and aspiration.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment is committed to being a place where anyone can enjoy a successful career, where it is safe to speak up, and where we learn continuously to improve together. We welcome applications from all candidates, regardless of demographic characteristics (age, disability, educational attainment, ethnicity, gender, marital status, neurodiversity, religion, sex, gender identity and sexual identity), cultural, or social class/background.
We believe better outcomes come through diversity of thought, background and approach. We welcome applications from people from all backgrounds and communities, actively seeking to employ people from a wide range of different communities.
