Private Cloud Principal Engineer

Undisclosed; Sheffield; On-site; GBP 78,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Undisclosed UK company seeks a Principal Engineer to lead the private cloud platform, shaping virtualization, containers, Kubernetes and Kafka-based event streaming for resilient, secure services. You will work with CTO teams to turn strategy into practical, well‑engineered outcomes.

Reporting to the Head of Private Cloud, you’ll drive architecture, standards and repeatable patterns, and advance platform reliability and cost efficiency on a contract running to 25 August 2027 with a daily rate of

Qualifications

• Extensive experience leading private cloud/platform engineering in large enterprises.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes cluster operations, multi-tenancy, and policy.
• Kafka/event streaming architecture and governance.
• Automation with IaC and CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across private cloud platform.
• Define standards, reference architectures, and guardrails.
• Lead end-to-end design of platform components (compute, storage, networking).
• Drive GitOps/CI/CD and automation-first approaches.
• Coach teams on microservices, API contracts, and observability.

Skills

Private cloud engineering

Kubernetes

Kafka

Automation / IaC

Security and compliance

Tools

VMware

Terraform

GitOps

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Duration: contract to run until 25/08/2027

Rate: up to £702.88 p/d Umbrellainside IR35

As a Principal Engineer in Private Cloud, you’ll provide hands‑on technical leadership across the clients' private cloud platform, shaping and improving our virtualisation, container and Kubernetes capabilities, and enabling resilient, secure, high-performing services (including Kafka-based event streaming and microservices platforms). Reporting to the Head of Private Cloud, you’ll partner closely with Product Owners, architects and engineering teams across CTO to turn strategy into practical, well‑engineered outcomes.

Key responsibilities

• Technical leadership & engineering excellence
• Set engineering direction for private cloud capabilities spanning virtualisation, containers, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices enablement.
• Act as a senior technical authority, review designs, challenge assumptions, and ensure solutions are supportable, secure, and cost‑effective.
• Define and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, patterns and guardrails (think: “paved roads”, not “speed bumps”).
• Lead the end‑to‑end design and evolution of private cloud platform components (compute, storage, networking, orchestration, platform services).
• Drive consistent platform capabilities across environments (dev/test/prod), improving reliability, scalability, performance and operability.
• Influence platform roadmaps with Product Owners; translate business and technology needs into actionable engineering plans.
• Own key decisions around Kubernetes platform design: cluster architecture, multi‑tenancy, ingress, service mesh (where applicable), policy, secrets, observability, upgrade strategies, and workload onboarding.
• Establish repeatable deployment patterns using GitOps/CI/CD, configuration management, and automation‑first approaches.
• Kafka & event‑driven platforms
• Provide technical leadership on Kafka platform usage and enablement (topic design patterns, partitioning strategy, resiliency, schema governance, security, monitoring and capacity planning).
• Partner with architects and service teams to adopt event‑driven patterns safely and consistently.
• Coach teams on microservices design, domain boundaries, API/event contracts, resiliency patterns, and operational readiness.
• Improve developer experience through templates, golden paths, self‑service capabilities, and clear documentation.
• Embed security‑by‑design and operational excellence: hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.
• Work as a bridge between Product, Architecture and Engineering—getting alignment without boiling the ocean.
• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences; write crisp design docs and influence decision forums.

To be successful in this role, you should meet the following requirements:

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer / Lead Engineer / Senior Staff Engineer (or equivalent) in large‑scale, regulated, enterprise environments.
• Strong background in private cloud / platform engineering, including solid depth in at least two of: Virtualisation technologies (e.g., VMware or equivalent), Containers & Kubernetes (cluster operations, upgrades, networking, multi‑tenancy, policy), Kafka/event streaming platforms (architecture, operations, governance)
• Strong engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, networking concepts, performance tuning, fault tolerance and capacity planning.
• Automation mindset with experience in Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices (tooling can vary).
• Strong operational and risk awareness: security controls, change management, and production readiness practices.
• Service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, policy‑as‑code.
• Observability platforms (metrics/logs/traces) and practical incident leadership.
• Experience building “platform as a product” capabilities (service catalogue, self‑service, developer portals).
• Experience with multi‑region / active‑active design considerations and resilience testing.

Leadership behaviours:

• We Value Difference: welcomes challenge, encourages diverse views, and makes space for quieter voices in technical discussions.
• We Succeed Together: builds strong partnerships across Product, Architecture and Engineering to deliver shared outcomes.
• We Take Responsibility: makes clear trade‑offs, owns decisions, and reduces operational and security risk proactively.
• We Get It Done: drives pragmatic outcomes, removes blockers, and raises engineering quality while moving at pace.

What success looks like:

• Faster, safer onboarding of workloads to the private cloud through repeatable patterns and self‑service capabilities.
• Improved platform stability and performance with measurable reliability outcomes (SLOs, reduced incidents, faster recovery).
• Clear, adopted standards for Kubernetes, Kafka and microservices usage across CTO engineering teams.
• Stronger collaboration across Product/Architecture/Engineering with transparent roadmaps and well‑governed technical decisions

Key relationships:

• Reports to: Head of Private Cloud
• Works closely with: Product Owners, CTO Architects, Platform/Infrastructure Engineering, Application Engineering teams, Cyber Security, Operations/SRE, and relevant governance forums

All profiles will be reviewed against the required skills and experience. Due to the high number of applications we will only be able to respond to successful applicants in the first instance. We thank you for your interest and the time taken to apply!