At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the design and evolution of a private cloud platform with cutting-edge technologies.
- Company: Join a leading global banking and financial services organisation.
- Benefits: Competitive £600/day rate, hybrid work model, and inside IR35.
- Other info: Opportunity to work on innovative projects with a focus on security and performance.
- Why this job: Shape the future of cloud technology in a dynamic, high-impact environment.
- Qualifications: Proven experience in cloud engineering and strong technical leadership skills.
The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.
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
Private Cloud Principal Engineer - 12 months - Sheffield- £600/day - Inside IR35 employer: Hamilton Barnes
Hamilton Barnes is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work environment in London where innovation meets opportunity. With competitive salaries, night shift allowances, and a strong focus on employee development through ongoing training, we empower our Field Service Engineers to advance their careers while enjoying a supportive team culture. Join us to be part of a growing engineering team that values your skills and fosters professional growth.
