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…