Principal Private Cloud Engineer in Cambridge

Job Description

You will define and lead the technical strategy for a private cloud platform based on OpenStack, delivering scalable and reliable infrastructure services for engineering teams.

The platform underpins large-scale engineering workloads and is central to the organisation’s infrastructure strategy. The platform is to be built using modern platform engineering principles, with strong emphasis on automation, APIs, and developer experience.

You will operate across teams and functions to drive architectural direction and platform evolution – the remit of the team is to develop the capabilities of the platform as an active participant within the OpenStack community rather than simply consuming and running upstream projects.

Responsibilities

• Define and design the long‑term architecture and strategy for multi‑tenant Private Cloud.
• Lead the integration of OpenStack across compute, networking and storage systems.
• Develop standards for Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), APIs and automation.
• Drive reliability, scalability and performance improvements across all platform components.
• Provide technical leadership in collaboration with multiple teams and domains.
• Guide platform engineering practices including CI/CD, telemetry and observability.
• Solve complex cross‑system challenges in distributed environments and HPC.
• Champion and enable seamless adoption of the new platform.
• Partner with the Internal Developer Platform teams to ensure a 1st‑class self‑service experience.
• Identify and improve workflow friction across multi‑disciplinary teams.
• Collaborate with the OSS community to drive upstream feature adoption.

Required Skills and Experience

• Deep expertise of the OpenStack ecosystem, Linux and distributed systems.
• Strong software engineering background (Python, APIs, systems design).
• Extensive experience with Ansible, Terraform and infrastructure automation.
• Experience with large‑scale or multi‑region systems and operating at significant scale.
• Deep understanding of networking, storage and Linux systems both physical and software defined.
• Proven track record in influencing technical direction across teams.

Nice To Have Skills and Experience

• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud‑native platforms.
• Low‑level debugging, performance and tuning engineering.
• Full‑stack expertise.
• Exposure to IDPs such as backstage, Roadie, etc.

In Return

You will shape the direction of a critical engineering platform, influence organisation‑wide technical decisions, and work in an environment focused on impact, innovation and teamwork.

Salary Range

£126,200 - £170,800 per year

Accommodations

If you need support or an accommodation to your best self during the recruitment process, please contact hr@unitedstatesdigital.space. All accommodation requests will be treated with confidentiality and handled at the discretion of the company.

Equal Opportunities

The company is an equal‑opportunity employer committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal opportunities are available to all applicants and colleagues. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.