Principal AWS Cloud Engineer

Package: £76,500 - £100,000 (salary dependent on experience) + Benefits Security Clearance: Due to the nature of the projects involved, applicants must be eligible to obtain Security Check (SC) Clearance as a minimum. 37-hour working week.<br />Hybrid working with an average of 3 days per week onsite.

The Role:

Our client is a leading UK technology and engineering organisation operating at the forefront of defence, security, digital transformation and advanced research. As a Principal AWS Cloud Engineer, you will define and drive cloud strategy, architect resilient and secure AWS-based solutions, and provide technical direction across multiple engineering teams. Acting as the highest level of technical escalation, you will play a pivotal role in shaping engineering best practices, mentoring engineers at all levels, and ensuring the successful delivery of enterprise-scale cloud solutions. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring deep AWS expertise and a passion for driving technical excellence.

Key Responsibilities:

Architect complex, multi-region, highly available AWS environments aligned to long-term business objectives and product roadmaps.<br />Write, test, and maintain complex, production-grade IaC using Terraform. You will be directly responsible for managing and scaling the AWS Control Tower and landing zone architectures<br />Actively contribute to codebase. Develop backend services, automation scripts, and custom tooling using modern programming languages.<br />Evaluate emerging AWS services and third-party technologies by prototyping them to enhance capability, efficiency and time-to-market.<br />Guide technical decision-making across engineering teams and ensure successful integration between infrastructure and software development.<br />Design, write AND deploy enterprise-grade CI/CD pipelines and internal developer platforms that enable our teams to ship securely and autonomously.<br />Drive AWS cost optimisation initiatives and improve performance across distributed systems, microservices, databases and network infrastructure.<br />Act as a trusted advisor to engineering leadership and contribute to cloud strategy, governance and architectural standards.<br />Mentor senior, mid-level and junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence. Essential Experience: Extensive experience designing, implementing and operating AWS cloud infrastructure.<br />Expert-level knowledge of AWS services, including networking technologies such as Transit Gateway and Direct Connect, compute, storage, security and governance.<br />Strong expertise in Infrastructure as Code and configuration management.<br />Software engineering background with advanced knowledge of Python, Go, Java or Node.js.<br />Demonstrable experience leading large-scale technical initiatives and influencing engineering strategy across multiple teams.<br />Proven track record designing, deploying and supporting large-scale distributed systems and microservices architectures.<br />Strong stakeholder management and the ability to drive technical consensus across complex organisations. Essential

Qualifications:

AWS Associate Certification minimum (Professional level certifications highly desirable) Interested? Apply today via the link provided