Private Cloud Architect in Northampton

Location: Hybrid Sheffield (3 days onsite mandatory) Inside IR35 Rate: £550.00

In this role, you will:

• 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).
• Partner closely with Product Owners, architects and engineering teams across CTO to turn strategy into practical, well-engineered outcomes.

Key responsibilities:

• Architectural design decisions in line with the clients 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 (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.
• Own key decisions around Kubernetes platform design: 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.
• 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.
• Work as a bridge between Product, Architecture and Engineering.
• 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 an Architect / 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, Containers & Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming platforms.
• 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.
• Strong operational and risk awareness: security controls, change management, and production readiness practices.

Desirable skills:

• Service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, policy-as-code.
• Observability platforms and practical incident leadership.
• Experience building 'platform as a product' capabilities.
• Experience with multi-region / active-active design considerations and resilience testing.

Leadership behaviours:

• We Value Difference: welcomes challenge, encourages diverse views, and makes space for quieter voices in technical discussions.
• We Succeed Together: builds strong partnerships across Product, Architecture and Engineering to deliver shared outcomes.
• 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.

What success looks like:

• 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.
• Clear, adopted standards for Kubernetes, Kafka and microservices usage across CTO engineering teams.
• Stronger collaboration across Product/Architecture/Engineering with transparent roadmaps and well-governed technical decisions.