Private Cloud Principal Engineer

Private Cloud Principal Engineer - Cloud & Platform Engineering

Location:

Sheffield (3 days onsite per week mandatory)
Duration:
Initial 3-6 Month Contract
Rate:
Up to £700 per day
Engagement: PAYE via Umbrella Only

Overview

An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced Principal Engineer to join a large-scale enterprise cloud engineering function. This role will provide technical leadership across critical platform engineering initiatives, focusing on private cloud technologies, Kubernetes, container platforms, event streaming and microservices enablement.

Working closely with Product Owners, Architects, Infrastructure Engineers and Engineering teams, you will play a key role in shaping platform strategy, defining engineering standards and driving the delivery of secure, resilient and scalable cloud services. This is an excellent opportunity for a senior engineering professional who thrives on solving complex technical challenges and influencing technical direction across enterprise environments.

Key Responsibilities

Provide technical leadership across cloud and platform engineering initiatives
Define and drive engineering standards, best practices, reference architectures and platform guardrails
Act as a senior technical authority, reviewing designs and ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, supportable and cost-effective
Lead the design and evolution of platform capabilities spanning compute, storage, networking, orchestration and platform services
Work closely with Product Owners and Architects to translate strategic objectives into practical engineering solutions
Drive improvements in reliability, scalability, performance and operational excellence across multiple environments
Champion automation-first approaches through Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and platform engineering best practices
Influence platform roadmaps and engineering strategy
Kubernetes & Container Technologies

Lead architectural decisions relating to Kubernetes and container platforms
Define standards for cluster architecture, networking, multi-tenancy, security and workload onboarding
Establish repeatable deployment patterns using Git Ops, automation and configuration management
Drive platform resilience,observability and operational maturity
Support platform upgrades, governance and lifecycle management
Event Streaming & Microservices

Provide leadership across Kafka and event-driven technology platforms
Establish standards for event streaming, resiliency, monitoring and governance
Support engineering teams in adopting event-driven architectures and microservices patterns
Drive best practice around API design, domain boundaries and service resilience
Improve developer productivity through self-service capabilities, reusable templates and engineering standards
Engineering Leadership

Mentor engineering teams and promote engineering excellence
Build strong relationships across Product, Architecture, Security and Engineering functions
Drive alignment between technical strategy and delivery objectives
Produce clear technical designs and influence decision-making forums
Support operational excellence, security-by-design and risk management practices
Essential Skills & Experience

Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer or equivalent
Strong background in Cloud, Infrastructure or Platform Engineering
Deep expertise in Kubernetes and container technologies

Experience with Kafka and event streaming platforms
Strong knowledge of private cloud technologies and enterprise virtualisation platforms such as VMware
Excellent understanding of distributed systems, networking, scalability and performance engineering

Experience with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD toolsets
Strong understanding of security,governance and operational readiness
Experience operating within large-scale enterprise environments
Desirable Skills

Service Mesh technologies
API Gateway solutions
Secrets Management platforms
Policy as Code
Observability and monitoring platforms
SRE and operational excellence practices
Platform-as-a-Product environments
Developer self-service capabilities and service catalogues
Multi-region architecture and resilience design
What You'll…