At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the design and evolution of our private cloud platform, enhancing virtualisation and Kubernetes capabilities.
- Company: Join a forward-thinking tech company with a hybrid work culture in Sheffield.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive pay, flexible working, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Collaborative environment with a focus on operational excellence and career advancement.
- Why this job: Shape the future of cloud technology while making a real impact on innovative projects.
- Qualifications: Strong background in private cloud engineering and experience with Kubernetes and Kafka.
The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.
Location: Hybrid Sheffield (3 days onsite mandatory)
As a Senior Architect in Private Cloud, you'll provide hands-on technical leadership across the client private cloud platform, shaping and improving our 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 CTO to turn strategy into practical, well-engineered outcomes.
- Set engineering direction for private cloud capabilities spanning virtualisation, containers, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices enablement.
- 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.
- 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.
- Provide technical leadership on Kafka platform usage and enablement (topic design patterns, partitioning strategy, resiliency, schema governance, security, monitoring and capacity planning).
- Embed security-by-design and operational excellence: hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.
Strong background in private cloud / platform engineering, including solid depth in at least two of: 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.
Strong operational and risk awareness: security controls, change management, and production readiness practices.
Experience building 'platform as a product' capabilities (service catalogue, self-service, developer portals).
Experience with multi-region / active-active design considerations and resilience testing.
We Take Responsibility: makes clear trade-offs, owns decisions, and reduces operational and security risk proactively.
We Get It Done: drives pragmatic outcomes, removes blockers, and raises engineering quality while moving at pace.
Faster, safer onboarding of workloads to the private cloud through repeatable patterns and self-service capabilities. Improved platform stability and performance with measurable reliability outcomes (SLOs, reduced incidents, faster recovery).
Locations
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