Enterprise Infrastructure Principal Engineer
Role Title: Enterprise Infrastructure Principal Engineer
Job Type: Contract
Location: Sheffield/Birmingham/Edinburgh
Start date: 19th January 2026
Performance Summary Statements
• Strong Performance:
Consistently demonstrates sound technical judgment, aligns platform decisions with enterprise goals, and enables progress across multiple teams.
• Exceptional Performance:
Sets enterprise-wide technical direction, reduces systemic risk, and scales impact through standards, strategy, and mentorship.
Architecture & Systems Knowledge
Meets Expectations
Demonstrates working knowledge of:
• Key Platform Products/Services
• Network topology, IAM, CI/CD, monitoring, and security tooling
• Accurately explains current-state architecture, dependencies, and constraints.
Exceeds Expectations
• Identifies undocumented system behaviors, hidden coupling, or legacy risks early.
• Provides leadership with a concise, accurate current-state assessment.
Reliability, Security & Risk Awareness
Meets Expectations
• Reviews historical incidents, audits, and compliance requirements.
• Understands escalation paths, operational ownership, and change management processes.
Exceeds Expectations
• Proactively identifies systemic reliability or security risks and articulates business impact.
• Surfaces risk tradeoffs in clear, executive-appropriate language.
Enterprise Influence & Collaboration
Meets Expectations
Establishes productive relationships across:
• Enterprise Infrastructure
• Security
• Application teams (our customers)
• Architecture review boards
• Respects governance and decision-making processes.
Exceeds Expectations
• Quickly earns trust as a neutral, high-judgment technical advisor.
• Is consulted informally on complex or sensitive technical decisions.
Architecture & Technical Direction
Meets Expectations
• Authors or contributes to enterprise-grade design documents.
Aligns proposals with:
• Enterprise architecture standards
• Security and compliance requirements
• Cost and operational constraints
Exceeds Expectations
• Simplifies or clarifies existing architecture standards.
• Resolves cross-team architectural disagreements through data and reasoning.
Execution & Delivery
Meets Expectations
Leads or materially contributes to at least one high-impact infrastructure initiative, such as:
• Platform modernization
• IaC standardization
• CI/CD reliability improvements
• Cost optimization
Exceeds Expectations
• Delivers measurable improvements (e.g., ↓ MTTR, ↓ deployment failures, ↓ cloud spend).
• Enables delivery across multiple teams without direct authority.
Reliability, Security & Operations
Meets Expectations
Improves consistency of:
• Incident response
• Postmortems
• Change management practices
Exceeds Expectations
• Introduces or strengthens reliability metrics, or risk dashboards used beyond a single team.
• Elevates operational maturity at the program or portfolio level.
Mentorship & Technical Stewardship
Meets Expectations
• Mentors senior/staff engineers through design reviews and technical guidance.
• Models strong documentation and decision-making discipline.
Exceeds Expectations
• Raises design quality across teams.
• Reduces rework and decision churn through clearer architectural guidance.
Enterprise Infrastructure Strategy
Meets Expectations
• Contributes to or co-owns infrastructure strategy and roadmap.
• Aligns infrastructure investments with business priorities and regulatory needs.
Exceeds Expectations
• Influences multi-year platform direction.
• Helps leadership make informed tradeoffs between speed, cost, and risk.
Systems Thinking & Risk Management
Meets Expectations
Establishes repeatable processes for:
• Architecture reviews
• Capacity planning
• Disaster recovery validation
Exceeds Expectations
• Reduces systemic risk through standardization and simplification.
• Prevents incidents through proactive design and early intervention.
Developer Productivity & Platform Enablement
Meets Expectations
• Improves clarity around:
• Ownership models
• Approved patterns
• Supported platforms
Exceeds Expectations
• Enables self-service infrastructure and "golden paths."
• Noticeable reduction in escalations and ad-hoc exceptions.
Organizational Leadership & Presence
Meets Expectations
• Communicates complex topics effectively to senior leadership.
• Operates comfortably in ambiguity and enterprise-scale complexity.
Exceeds Expectations
• Recognized as a principal-level authority across multiple organizations.
• Shapes culture around quality, reliability, and technical excellence.
Disclaimer
Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.
Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement.