Head Cloud Principal Engineer

The Role: Head Cloud Principal Engineer

Location: Sheffield, UK

Position Type: Contract Inside IR35

Remote work option Available: Hybrid - 3 Days Onsite

Job Description:

Key responsibilities

Technical leadership & engineering excellence

• Set engineering direction for private cloud capabilities spanning virtualisation, containers, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices enablement.
• Act as a senior technical authority, review designs, challenge assumptions, and ensure solutions are supportable, secure, and cost-effective.
• Define and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, patterns and guardrails (think: paved roads, not speed bumps ).
• Lead the end-to-end design and evolution of private cloud platform components (compute, storage, networking, orchestration, platform services).
• Drive consistent platform capabilities across environments (dev/test/prod), improving reliability, scalability, performance and operability.
• Influence platform roadmaps with Product Owners; translate business and technology needs into actionable engineering plans.

Kubernetes & container platform

• Own key decisions around Kubernetes platform design: cluster architecture, multi-tenancy, ingress, service mesh (where applicable), policy, secrets, observability, upgrade strategies, and workload onboarding.
• Establish repeatable deployment patterns using GitOps/CI/CD, configuration management, and automation-first approaches.
• Kafka & event-driven platforms
• Provide technical leadership on Kafka platform usage and enablement (topic design patterns, partitioning strategy, resiliency, schema governance, security, monitoring and capacity planning).
• Partner with architects and service teams to adopt event-driven patterns safely and consistently.
• Coach teams on microservices design, domain boundaries, API/event contracts, resiliency patterns, and operational readiness.
• Improve developer experience through templates, golden paths, self-service capabilities, and clear documentation.
• Embed security-by-design and operational excellence: hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.
• Work as a bridge between Product, Architecture and Engineering-getting alignment without boiling the ocean.
• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences; write crisp design docs and influence decision forums.

Key relationships:

• Reports to: Head of Private Cloud

• Works closely with: Product Owners, CTO Architects, Platform/Infrastructure Engineering, Application Engineering teams, Cyber Security, Operations/SRE, and relevant governance forums.

To be successful in this role, you should meet the following requirements:

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer/Lead Engineer/Senior Staff Engineer (or equivalent) in large-scale, regulated, enterprise environments.
• Strong background in private cloud/platform engineering, including solid depth in at least two of: Virtualisation technologies (eg, VMware or equivalent), Containers & Kubernetes (cluster operations, upgrades, networking, multi-tenancy, policy), Kafka/event streaming platforms (architecture, operations, governance)
• Strong engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, networking concepts, performance tuning, fault tolerance and capacity planning.
• Automation mindset with experience in Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices (tooling can vary).
• Strong operational and risk awareness: security controls, change management, and production readiness practices.