Principal Cloud Engineer (Azure)

TOPdesk; Delft; On-site; EUR 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

TOPdesk is seeking a Principal Cloud Engineer in Delft to serve as the senior technical authority for cloud engineering behind our large-scale SaaS platform, ensuring 24/7 availability and performance. You will shape the cloud strategy with the Director of Cloud & Developer Operations, mentor engineers, and guide architectural decisions, driving cross-team initiatives within Deploy, Run & Optimize.

This is hands-on technical leadership, not management, focused on AI-native tooling,

Qualifications

• Extensive cloud engineering experience with SaaS platforms.
• Proven ability to lead technical direction across teams.
• Hands-on in cloud estate with DevOps/CloudOps focus.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-team cloud initiatives in Deploy, Run & Optimize.
• Mentor engineers and guide architectural decisions.
• Ensure 24/7 reliability, performance, and observability.

Skills

Cloud architecture

SaaS engineering

DevOps

Site Reliability Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

TOPdesk builds service management software used across education, healthcare, government, and manufacturing. We are 800+ colleagues in 11 offices worldwide. Founded over 30 years ago, we serve more than 10 million users worldwide and have been helping organisations deliver better services ever since. We are an open, collaborative organisation with little hierarchy - people own their work end to end and are trusted to make the decisions that matter. We are reinventing ITSM and ESM for the agentic era, building AI agents our customers can trust, and this role is part of that.

About the role

As a Principal Cloud Engineer, you are the senior technical authority for cloud engineering behind our large-scale SaaS platform - thousands of customer environments under stringent 24/7 availability and performance requirements. You form and drive the cloud technical strategy with the Director of Cloud & Developer Operations, and lead through expertise and influence: guiding architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and holding coherent technical direction across teams - not owning the cloud function organisationally. This is the most senior individual-contributor cloud role in the Deploy, Run & Optimize lane - our CloudOps and DevOps function. You lead the hardest cross-team cloud initiatives and infrastructure transformation, and you bring our AI-native ways of working into how the platform is built, operated, and remediated - agents and bounded automation with observability, approvals, containment, and rollback, not just runbooks. You are here to take our technology to the next level.

What this is not

A detached architect removed from production, or a people-management role. This is principal-level technical leadership - hands-on in the estate, setting the direction other engineers build on.

Your product lane

You anchor in the Deploy, Run & Optimize lane, where cloud infrastructure, reliability, and optimisation live, and set technical direction across its teams: Deploy, Run & Optimize - how TOPdesk runs The Deploy, Run & Optimize lane - our CloudOps and DevOps function - owns how TOPdesk runs: SaaS infrastructure and SRE, environment handling, data persistence, observability, and the DevOps/DevEx that keep delivery fast and safe.

The team

You join our SaaS platform engineering in Delft - teams of social technicians building a robust, scalable cloud platform, working to agile principles with a collaboratively managed backlog and two-week sprints. You report to the Director of Cloud & Developer Operations and set technical direction that reaches well beyond any single team.