Principal Cloud Platform Engineer in Cambridge

You are an engineer with passion for automation and for “keeping things simple and running”. You understand and appreciate what is required to run, monitor and scale an enterprise cloud product. You have an interest in continuously improving the development and software lifecycle experience, but especially the customer and user experience.

You have experience in designing and building CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure to support hosting cloud services at scale, including meeting customer expectations and SLAs. You also understand quality, resiliency, observability and supportability. This role is suited to an experienced Principal Cloud Platform Engineer who can operate autonomously in a complex cloud environment, rapidly understand existing systems, and provide technical leadership across infrastructure, reliability, and delivery practices.

Our team, The StoreFront Services team, based in Cambridge UK, develops Citrix StoreFront, the sole access layer for our Desktop-as-a-Service solutions. StoreFront is available as either a Citrix‑managed cloud solution (Citrix Workspace), or a service that can be installed and managed by the customer. Our systems aggregate data from diverse sources to provide information consumed by clients for mobile, desktop and the web. We also contribute to new features and transformation projects across the full technology stack while maintaining a focus on scalability, reliability and security.

Role Responsibilities:

• You will be part of the StoreFront team whose mission is to grow and scale our Cloud StoreFront Product, which currently has over 3 million monthly active users.
• Act as a senior technical authority for reliability, availability, and operability of our cloud platform.
• Shape and influence system designs to ensure reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency are built in from the outset.
• Own the technical quality and evolution of our cloud infrastructure and delivery pipelines, identifying and addressing systemic risks.
• Drive improvements to reliability practices, incident response, and post‑incident learning across teams.
• Provide hands‑on expertise across infrastructure, automation, and CI/CD when needed, particularly in complex or high‑impact areas.
• Mentor engineers and raise the overall cloud maturity of the organisation.
• Partner with engineering leadership in defining and evolving SRE practices and platform architecture (without people‑management responsibility).
• Act as a senior escalation point during major incidents and participate in on‑call escalations as required.

Requirements:

• You have significant experience operating, evolving, and supporting large‑scale, production cloud services consisting of multiple technologies and components.
• You have a deep understanding of modern cloud‑native systems, including containerised workloads and Kubernetes‑based platforms.
• You have strong experience designing and maintaining cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (for example, Terraform).
• You have a proven ability to design, build, and evolve CI/CD platforms and deployment pipelines (for example, Jenkins).
• You have experience writing and reviewing production‑quality code or automation in languages such as C#, Groovy, PowerShell, or similar.
• You have extensive experience with observability, monitoring, and alerting, and with using telemetry to drive reliability improvements (for example, Splunk, Grafana).
• You have experience operating in regulated or compliance‑driven environments and designing systems and processes that meet multiple compliance requirements.
• You can look at an architecture diagram, a deploy pipeline, a monitoring gap, and a team process, and see how they connect.
• You are comfortable leading technical discussions, challenging designs, and making pragmatic trade‑offs in ambiguous situations.
• You have a proven ability to work autonomously, influence teams, and act as a force multiplier through technical leadership.
• You understand networking deeply — not just “it works,” but why it works and what happens when it doesn’t.
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity. Principal‑level work means making decisions with incomplete information and being accountable for the trade‑offs.

Nice to have:

• You've managed cloud spend and made architectural decisions driven by cost analysis.
• You've worked in environments where the same product is deployed both as a managed service and on‑prem.
• You are confident using AI‑assisted/agentic development tools (e.g., Copilot, Windsurf) daily, with strong judgement around validation, security, and code quality.

Location: Remote with the option to use our office in a Co‑Working Facility near Cambridge North train station.