Head Cloud Principal Engineer

The Role: Head Cloud Principal Engineer

Location: Sheffield, UK

Position Type: Contract Inside IR35

Remote work option Available: Hybrid - 3 Days Onsite

Job Description:

Key responsibilities

Technical leadership & engineering excellence

Set engineering direction for private cloud capabilities spanning virtualisation, containers, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices enablement.
Act as a senior technical authority, review designs, challenge assumptions, and ensure solutions are supportable, secure, and cost-effective.
Define and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, patterns and guardrails (think: paved roads, not speed bumps ).
Lead the end-to-end design and evolution of private cloud platform components (compute, storage, networking, orchestration, platform services).
Drive consistent platform capabilities across environments (dev/test/prod), improving reliability, scalability, performance and operability.
Influence platform roadmaps with Product Owners; translate business and technology needs into actionable engineering plans.

Kubernetes & container platform

Own key decisions around Kubernetes platform design: 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.
Kafka & event-driven platforms
Provide technical leadership on Kafka platform usage and enablement (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/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: hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.
Work as a bridge between Product, Architecture and Engineering-getting alignment without boiling the ocean.
Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences; write crisp design docs and influence decision forums.

Key relationships:

Works closely with: Product Owners, CTO Architects, Platform/Infrastructure Engineering, Application Engineering teams, Cyber Security, Operations/SRE, and relevant governance forums.

To be successful in this role, you should meet the following requirements:

Proven experience as a Principal Engineer/Lead Engineer/Senior Staff Engineer (or equivalent) in large-scale, regulated, enterprise environments.
Strong background in private cloud/platform engineering, including solid depth in at least two of: Virtualisation technologies (eg, VMware or equivalent), Containers & Kubernetes (cluster operations, upgrades, networking, multi-tenancy, policy), Kafka/event streaming platforms (architecture, operations, governance)
Strong engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, networking concepts, performance tuning, fault tolerance and capacity planning.
Automation mindset with experience in Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices (tooling can vary).
Strong operational and risk awareness: security controls, change management, and production readiness practices.

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