Private Cloud Principal Engineer - 12 months - Sheffield- £600/day - Inside IR35

Private Cloud Principal Engineer - 12 months - Sheffield (HYBRID) £600/day - Inside IR35

We're recruiting for a Principal Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across a private cloud platform for a leading global banking and financial services organisation, shaping and improving virtualisation, container, and Kubernetes capabilities, and enabling resilient, secure, high-performing services including Kafka-based event streaming and microservices platforms. Reporting to the Head of Private Cloud, you'll partner closely with Product Owners, architects, and engineering teams across the CTO function to turn strategy into practical, well-engineered outcomes.

Key Responsibilities:

• Set engineering direction for private cloud capabilities spanning virtualisation, containers, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices enablement
• Act as senior technical authority, reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, and ensuring solutions are supportable, secure, and cost-effective
• Define and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails
• Lead end-to-end design and evolution of private cloud platform components (compute, storage, networking, orchestration, platform services)
• Drive consistent platform capabilities across dev/test/prod environments, improving reliability, scalability, performance, and operability
• Own key Kubernetes platform design decisions: cluster architecture, multi-tenancy, ingress, service mesh, policy, secrets, observability, upgrade strategies, and workload onboarding
• Establish repeatable deployment patterns using GitOps/CI/CD, configuration management, and automation-first approaches
• Provide technical leadership on Kafka platform usage: topic design patterns, partitioning strategy, resiliency, schema governance, security, monitoring, and capacity planning

What You Will Ideally Bring:

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

Contract Details:

• Duration: 12 months
• Rate: £600/day - Inside IR35
• Location: Sheffield (2 days per week)
• Start Date: ASAP