Senior Architect - Private Cloud

Role- Senior Architect

Contract- 6 months rolling

Location- Sheffield, UK

Rate- 600 GBP/day (Inside IR35)

• We are seeking an experienced Senior Architect - Private Cloud to provide hands-on technical leadership across a large-scale private cloud platform. The role will focus on shaping and evolving virtualisation, containerisation, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices capabilities to deliver secure, resilient, high-performing technology services.
• You will work closely with Product Owners, Architects, Platform Engineering, Application Engineering, Cyber Security, and Operations/SRE teams to translate technology strategy into practical, scalable engineering solutions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and lead architectural decisions aligned with the organisation's cloud and technology strategy.
• Set technical direction across private cloud capabilities, including virtualisation, Kubernetes, containers, Kafka, and microservices platforms.
• Design and evolve private cloud platform components covering compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and platform services.
• Establish engineering standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns, and technical guardrails.
• Provide technical leadership on Kubernetes architecture, including cluster design, multi-tenancy, networking, security, observability, upgrades, and workload onboarding.
• Drive automation-first deployment practices using GitOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and configuration management.
• Provide architectural guidance for Kafka and event-driven platforms, including resiliency, partitioning, security, governance, monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Coach engineering teams on microservices architecture, APIs, event contracts, resiliency, and operational readiness.
• Improve developer experience through golden paths, templates, self-service capabilities, and clear technical documentation.
• Embed security-by-design, operational excellence, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, and auditability.
• Work with Product Owners to shape platform roadmaps and translate business and technology requirements into actionable engineering plans.
• Review technical designs, challenge assumptions, and ensure solutions are secure, supportable, scalable, and cost-effective.
• Support improvements across development, test, and production environments to enhance reliability, performance, scalability, and operability.
• Communicate complex technical concepts effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Essential Skills & Experience:

• Proven experience working as a Senior Architect, Platform Architect, Lead Engineer, or Senior/Staff Engineer within large-scale enterprise environments.
• Strong experience in private cloud and platform engineering.

Significant expertise in at least two of the following:

• Virtualisation technologies such as VMware or equivalent
• Containers and Kubernetes
• Kafka/Event Streaming platforms
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, performance tuning, fault tolerance, and capacity planning.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automation, and configuration management.
• Strong understanding of production readiness, security controls, operational risk, and change management.
• Experience designing and implementing highly available and resilient platform solutions.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence across Architecture, Product, Engineering, Security, and Operations.