Private Cloud Senior Architect

Salary: £? - ? per year

Requirements:

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

Responsibilities:

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across our private cloud platform.
• Shape and improve our virtualisation, container, and Kubernetes capabilities.
• Enable resilient, secure, high-performing services, including Kafka-based event streaming and microservices platforms.
• Partner closely with Product Owners, architects, and engineering teams across CTO to turn strategy into practical, well-engineered outcomes.
• Make architectural design decisions in line with our Cloud Strategy.
• Set engineering direction for private cloud capabilities spanning virtualisation, containers, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices enablement.
• Act as a senior technical authority, reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, and ensuring solutions are supportable, secure, and cost-effective.
• Define and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails.
• Lead the end-to-end design and evolution of private cloud platform components, including compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and platform services.
• Drive consistent platform capabilities across dev, test, and production environments, improving reliability, scalability, performance, and operability.
• Influence platform roadmaps with Product Owners and translate business and technology needs into actionable engineering plans.
• Own key decisions around Kubernetes platform design, including 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.
• Provide technical leadership on Kafka platform usage and enablement, including 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 and 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, including hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.
• Act as a bridge between Product, Architecture, and Engineering to achieve alignment.
• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences and write concise design documents.
• Influence decision forums and collaborate with Product Owners, CTO Architects, Platform and Infrastructure Engineering, Application Engineering teams, Cyber Security, Operations and SRE, and relevant governance forums.

Technologies:

• API
• Architect
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• CTO
• GitOps
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Security
• VMware
• microservices

More:

We are recruiting for a Private Cloud Senior Architect based in Sheffield with a work setup of 60% office and 40% home. This is a contract role running to 25-Dec-26 with a chance for extension, at a rate of £515. The contractor must be eligible for BPSS and must be PAYE through umbrella. We are looking for someone who can provide hands-on technical leadership across our private cloud platform and work closely with Product Owners, architects, engineering, cyber security, operations, SRE, and governance teams. Our leadership values include welcoming challenge and diverse views, building strong partnerships, taking responsibility, and delivering pragmatic outcomes while raising engineering quality.

last updated 36 week of 2026