Private Cloud Principal Engineer

Salary: £? - ? per year

Requirements:

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer, or equivalent
• Strong background in Cloud, Infrastructure, or Platform Engineering
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes and container technologies
• Experience with Kafka and event streaming platforms
• Strong knowledge of private cloud technologies and enterprise virtualisation platforms such as VMware
• Excellent understanding of distributed systems, networking, scalability, and performance engineering
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD toolsets
• Strong understanding of security, governance, and operational readiness
• Experience operating within large-scale enterprise environments
• Strong technical leadership and decision-making skills
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and communication abilities
• A passion for engineering excellence and platform modernisation
• The ability to influence technical direction across complex environments
• A pragmatic approach to solving large-scale engineering challenges

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership across cloud and platform engineering initiatives
• Define and drive engineering standards, best practices, reference architectures, and platform guardrails
• Act as a senior technical authority, reviewing designs and ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, supportable, and cost-effective
• Lead the design and evolution of platform capabilities spanning compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and platform services
• Work closely with Product Owners and Architects to translate strategic objectives into practical engineering solutions
• Drive improvements in reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence across multiple environments
• Champion automation-first approaches through Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and platform engineering best practices
• Influence platform roadmaps and engineering strategy
• Lead architectural decisions relating to Kubernetes and container platforms
• Define standards for cluster architecture, networking, multi-tenancy, security, and workload onboarding
• Establish repeatable deployment patterns using GitOps, automation, and configuration management
• Drive platform resilience, observability, and operational maturity
• Support platform upgrades, governance, and lifecycle management
• Provide leadership across Kafka and event-driven technology platforms
• Establish standards for event streaming, resiliency, monitoring, and governance
• Support engineering teams in adopting event-driven architectures and microservices patterns
• Drive best practice around API design, domain boundaries, and service resilience
• Improve developer productivity through self-service capabilities, reusable templates, and engineering standards
• Mentor engineering teams and promote engineering excellence
• Build strong relationships across Product, Architecture, Security, and Engineering functions
• Drive alignment between technical strategy and delivery objectives
• Produce clear technical designs and influence decision-making forums
• Support operational excellence, security-by-design, and risk management practices

Technologies:

• API
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• GitOps
• Support
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Security
• VMware
• microservices
• DevOps

More:

We are offering an exciting 3-6 month contract opportunity for an experienced Principal Engineer to join our large-scale enterprise cloud and platform engineering function in Sheffield, with three days onsite per week required. This role is PAYE via umbrella only and offers a rate of up to £700 per day. You will help shape platform strategy and drive the delivery of secure, resilient, and scalable cloud services across private cloud technologies, Kubernetes, container platforms, event streaming, and microservices enablement. You will work closely with Product Owners, Architects, Infrastructure Engineers, and engineering teams in a senior role focused on technical leadership, engineering excellence, and platform modernisation.

last updated 32 week of 2026