Senior Architect - Private Cloud
Senior Architect Private Cloud (Banking and Finance client)
Location: Sheffield, UK(Hybrid, 2 days in a week)
6 months contract
10+ years of experience
Skills: Kubernetes, Kafka, VMware, Virtualization
Responsibilities:
- Define and drive Private Cloud architecture aligned with Client Cloud Strategy
- Provide hands on technical leadership across virtualization containers Kubernetes, Kafka and microservices platforms
- Review architecture designs and ensure solutions are secure scalable resilient and cost effective
- Establish engineering standards reference architectures reusable patterns and platform guardrails
- Lead the design and evolution of private cloud platform components including compute storage networking orchestration and platform services
- Drive platform consistency across development testing and production environments
- Translate business and technology requirements into actionable platform engineering roadmaps
- Own Kubernetes architecture decisions including cluster design multitenancy ingress service mesh secrets management observability upgrade strategies and workload onboarding
- Establish GitOps CICD automation and configuration management standards
- Provide technical leadership for Kafka and EventDriven Architecture adoption
- Define Kafka governance partitioning strategies resiliency patterns schema management monitoring and capacity planning
- Guide engineering teams on microservices architecture domain design resiliency API contracts and operational readiness
- Improve developer experience through selfservice capabilities templates golden paths and platform tooling
- Embed SecuritybyDesign identity management vulnerability management auditability and operational excellence practices
- Collaborate with Product Owners Architects Engineering Teams Cyber Security and SRE teams
- Influence technical strategy and engineering decisions across CTO platform domains
To be successful in this role you should have
- Proven experience as a Senior Architect Lead Engineer Staff Engineer Platform Architect or equivalent
- Strong Private Cloud and Platform Engineering background
- Deep expertise in at least two of the following
- VMware or Virtualization Technologies
- Kubernetes and Container Platforms
- KafkaEvent Streaming Platforms
- Strong Kubernetes experience including cluster operations networking upgrades multitenancy policy management observability and workload onboarding
- Strong Kafka architecture operations governance security and capacity planning experience
- Deep understanding of Distributed Systems Networking Fault Tolerance Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code IaC and CICD practices
- Strong understanding of Security Controls Change Management Risk Management and Production Readiness
- Experience working in regulated enterprise environments
- Strong stakeholder management and technical leadership skills
- Excellent communication and architecture documentation capabilities
- Experience with Service Mesh technologies is desirable
- Knowledge of API Gateways Secrets Management and PolicyasCode is preferred
- Experience with Observability platforms including Metrics Logs and Traces
- Experience building PlatformasaProduct capabilities such as developer portals and selfservice platforms
- Knowledge of MultiRegion ActiveActive and Resilience Testing architectures is advantageous