Principal Cloud Architect

Overview

3 Month initial contract, scope for extension.

Location:

Southampton - 2x a week on site.

Role:
Principal Cloud Platform Engineer with strong Dev Ops leadership capability to design, deliver and improve secure, scalable cloud platforms across Azure and AWS. Focus on building and governing cloud architecture patterns, landing zones, infrastructure standards and automation practices, while collaborating with engineering, security, product and delivery teams. Provide manager-level technical leadership across Dev Ops, cloud platforms, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, networking, security, observability and reliability engineering.

• Own and evolve Azure & AWS cloud architecture, platform patterns, guardrails, and design principles. Provide architectural oversight across Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines (Azure Dev Ops, Git Hub Actions), networking patterns, and compute/storage design.
• Evaluate platform changes including major provider upgrades (AzureRM / Cloudflare), disaster recovery and high availability improvements, cost optimization strategies, and observability frameworks.
• Lead technical designs for large-scale refactoring and provider upgrades, environment creation pipelines, secure container registry access, integration and Zero Trust patterns, and event-driven architectures with caching strategies.
• Drive Cloudflare integration (CDN, WAF, edge, traffic management) aligned to Azure networking and security architecture.
• Provide engineering governance through review of RFCs, design documents, and technical decisions; collaborate with delivery teams, security, shared services, and product groups to maintain aligned architecture.

• 8-12+ years in cloud engineering/architecture, with deep expertise in Azure architecture (networking, App Services, Functions, APIM, PaaS, ACR, VNets, Private Endpoints, security).
• Strong Terraform experience (modules, pipelines, state management).
• Strong CI/CD background.
• Experience designing for SRE (DR, failover, monitoring, logging, autoscaling, resilience) and working across multiple engineering teams.
• Previous Cloudflare experience.
• Architecture-led platform role (not a pure Solution Architect); deep scripting expertise not a primary requirement.