Private Cloud Architect

Salary: £136,500 - 143,000 per year

Requirements

• Proven experience as an Architect, Engineer, Lead Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer, or equivalent in large-scale, regulated, enterprise environments.
• Strong background in private cloud or platform engineering, with solid depth in at least two of the following: virtualisation technologies (for example VMware or equivalent), containers and Kubernetes, or Kafka/event streaming platforms.
• Strong engineering fundamentals, including distributed systems, networking concepts, performance tuning, fault tolerance, and capacity planning.
• Automation mindset with experience in Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices.
• Strong operational and risk awareness, including security controls, change management, and production readiness practices.
• Experience with service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, or policy-as-code.
• Experience with observability platforms covering metrics, logs, and traces, and practical incident leadership.
• Experience building platform-as-a-product capabilities such as service catalogues, self-service, or developer portals.
• Experience with multi-region or active-active design considerations and resilience testing.
• Strong leadership behaviours, including welcoming challenge, building partnerships, taking responsibility, and driving pragmatic outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across our private cloud platform, shaping and improving virtualisation, container, and Kubernetes capabilities.
• Make architectural design decisions aligned to our Cloud Strategy.
• 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.
• Lead the end-to-end design and evolution of private cloud platform components, including compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and platform services.
• Drive consistent platform capabilities across dev, test, and prod environments, improving reliability, scalability, performance, and operability.
• Influence platform roadmaps with Product Owners and translate business and technology needs into actionable engineering plans.
• Own key decisions around Kubernetes platform design, including 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 and enablement, including 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 and 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, including hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.
• Act as a bridge between Product, Architecture, and Engineering to build alignment and deliver practical outcomes.
• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences and write crisp design documents.

Technologies

• API
• Architect
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• CTO
• GitOps
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Security
• VMware
• microservices

More

We are a hybrid team based in Sheffield, with three days onsite required. This senior private cloud role reports to our Head of Private Cloud and works closely with Product Owners, CTO architects, Platform and Infrastructure Engineering, Application Engineering, Cyber Security, Operations/SRE, and governance forums. The role is inside IR35 with a rate of £550. We are focused on building resilient, secure, high-performing private cloud services, including Kafka-based event streaming and microservices platforms, and on improving workload onboarding through repeatable patterns, self-service capabilities, and clear engineering standards. Success in this role means stronger collaboration, clearer technical direction, and measurable improvements in platform stability, performance, and reliability.

last updated 36 week of 2026