Senior Architect Private Cloud

Randstad Technologies Recruitment; Sheffield; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Randstad Technologies Recruitment is seeking a Senior Private Cloud Architect to define and drive the evolution of our enterprise private cloud infrastructure in Sheffield. You will provide hands-on technical leadership across Kubernetes, Kafka, and virtualization to ensure secure, scalable platforms for developers.

The role requires 10+ years in platform architecture, deep expertise in at least two areas (Kubernetes/Containers, Kafka, or VMware), and a track record of delivering resilient

Qualifications

• 10+ years in platform architecture/engineering.
• Hands-on expertise in two or more: Kubernetes/Containers, Kafka, or VMware.
• DevOps, IaC, CI/CD, GitOps experience.
• Security-by-Design principles and distributed systems exposure.

Responsibilities

• Define the private cloud roadmap with reference architectures and guardrails.
• Lead the Kubernetes ecosystem: topology, multi-tenancy, ingress, service mesh, and observability.
• Direct Apache Kafka adoption: partitioning, schema, resilience, capacity, security.
• Drive GitOps, IaC, and CI/CD standardization; build self-service platform capabilities.
• Ensure production readiness across multi-region, high-availability environments.
• Collaborate with Product, Cyber Security, SRE, and CTO for technical decisions.

Skills

Kubernetes

Kafka

Virtualization

Distributed Systems

DevOps

IaC

Tools

Istio

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

ELK

Job description

Role: Senior Architect - Private Cloud

Location: Sheffield, UK (Hybrid: 2 days/week on-site)

Duration: 6 Months (Inside IR35)

Experience Level: 10+ YearsRole Overview

We are seeking a Senior Private Cloud Architect to define, design, and drive the evolution of our enterprise private cloud infrastructure. You will provide hands‑on technical leadership across container platforms, event streaming architectures, and virtualization environments, ensuring our platforms are secure, resilient, scalable, and developer-friendly.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Strategy & Standards: Define the private cloud roadmap aligned with broader enterprise goals. Establish reference architectures, engineering standards, reusable design patterns, and platform guardrails.


• Kubernetes Platform Leadership: Own the end-to-end Kubernetes ecosystem, including cluster topology, multi‑tenancy, ingress, service mesh, secrets management, observability, and seamless workload onboarding.


• Event-Driven Architecture: Direct the adoption and governance of Apache Kafka, covering partitioning strategies, schema management, resilience patterns, capacity planning, and security.


• Platform Engineering & Automation: Drive GitOps, IaC, and CI/CD standardization. Enhance developer experience by creating self‑service golden paths, developer portals, and automated platform capabilities.


• Security & Operational Resilience: Implement Security‑by‑Design principles, policy‑as‑code, vulnerability management, and robust RBAC. Ensure production readiness across multi‑region, high‑availability environments.


• Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborate across Product, Cyber Security, SRE, and CTO domains to influence technical decision‑making and mentor engineering teams.

Key Requirements

• Core Expertise: 10+ years in platform architecture/engineering with deep hands‑on expertise in at least two of the following: Kubernetes/Containers, Kafka/Event Streaming, or VMware/Virtualization.


• Distributed Systems: Proven background in designing secure, fault‑tolerant, high‑performance distributed systems within regulated enterprise environments.


• DevOps & IaC: Practical experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and configuration management.


• Desirable Skills: Familiarity with Service Mesh (e.g., Istio), API Gateways, Policy as Code (e.g., OPA), developer portals (Platform‑as‑a‑Product), and Observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, ELK).