At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the design and evolution of HSBC's private cloud platform with cutting-edge technologies.
- Company: Join HSBC, a global leader in banking and financial services.
- Benefits: Competitive day rate, hybrid working model, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Collaborative culture focused on innovation and excellence.
- Why this job: Shape the future of cloud technology while making a real impact in a dynamic environment.
- Qualifications: Proven experience in cloud engineering and strong technical leadership skills.
The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.
Role/Job title
Private Cloud Principal Engineer
Work Location
Sheffield
Role type/Duration
12 Months contract
Mode of working
Hybrid (3 days)
Day rate
GBP 580 /day (Inside IR35)
The Role
As a Principal Engineer in Private Cloud, you’ll provide hands‑on technical leadership across HSBC’s 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.
Your responsibilities
- Technical leadership & engineering excellence
- 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 (think: "paved roads", not "speed bumps").
- 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 (where applicable), policy, secrets, observability, upgrade strategies, and workload onboarding.
- Establish repeatable deployment patterns using Git Ops/CI/CD, configuration management, and automation‑first approaches.
- Kafka & event‑driven platforms
- Provide technical leadership on Kafka platform usage and enablement (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/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: hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.
- Work as a bridge between Product, Architecture and Engineering—getting alignment without boiling the ocean.
- Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences; write crisp design docs and influence decision forums.
Your Profile
Essential skills/knowledge/experience
- 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.
- Proven experience as a Principal 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 (e. g., 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.
- Automation mindset with experience in Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices (tooling can vary).
- Strong operational and risk awareness: security controls, change management, and production readiness practices.
Desirable skills/knowledge/experience: (As applicable)
- Service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, policy-as-code.
- Observability platforms (metrics/logs/traces) and practical incident leadership.
- Experience building “platform as a product” capabilities (service catalogue, self‑service, developer portals).
- 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.
- #J-18808-Ljbffr
Cloud Engineer in Sheffield employer: Silicon Logic UK Ltd.
At Silicon Logic UK Ltd., we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work culture that fosters innovation and collaboration. Our commitment to employee growth is evident through continuous training opportunities and a supportive environment, particularly in our hybrid role tailored for the UK Public Sector. Join us to make a meaningful impact while enjoying the unique advantages of working with government clients and contributing to vital ITOM solutions.
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We think this is how you could land Cloud Engineer in Sheffield
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We think you need these skills to ace Cloud Engineer in Sheffield
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How to prepare for a job interview at Silicon Logic UK Ltd.
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