Principal Cloud Architect in Manchester

Founded in Switzerland in 1968, Zühlke is owned by its partners and located across Europe and Asia. We are a global transformation partner, with engineering and innovation in our DNA. We're trusted to help clients envision and build their businesses for the future – to run smarter today while adapting for tomorrow’s markets, customers, and communities. Our multidisciplinary teams specialise in tech strategy and business innovation, digital solutions and applications, and device and systems engineering. We excel in complex, regulated spaces including health and finance, connecting strategy, tech implementation, and operational services to help clients become more effective, resilient businesses. If you share our values and want to do the best work, for the right reasons, we can offer you the chance to do it on a global scale and play a real role in shaping our exciting journey.

The Role

As a Principal Cloud Architect, you will lead the definition and evolution of the AWS-based platform. You will be responsible for ensuring the platform is secure, compliant, observable, and optimised for developer experience. You will establish golden paths, reusable patterns, and governance-ready delivery workflows using Harness, enabling squads to build efficiently on the Next Gen platform. Your work will form the foundation for scalable, reliable, and compliant product delivery across the organisation.

How you’ll make impact

• Designing – You will create secure, scalable, and resilient AWS landing zones, network architectures, and multi-account environments that support long-term platform growth.
• Enabling – You will act as a platform product owner, understanding developer needs and delivering tools, workflows, and automation that improve productivity and reliability.
• Standardising – You will define golden paths, infrastructure-as-code standards, and governance patterns that ensure consistency and compliance across teams.
• Protecting – You will embed security, auditability, and operational resilience into every layer of the platform, supporting regulatory and risk requirements.
• Uplifting – You will coach and support platform engineers, driving adoption of best practices and improving engineering maturity across squads.

What’s important to us

• Platform leadership – You have experience leading platform engineering initiatives in regulated or complex environments.
• Cloud expertise – You bring strong hands-on experience with AWS services, including compute, networking, security, and data platforms.
• Automation mindset – You are highly proficient in Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK and enjoy building reusable, scalable solutions.
• Delivery excellence – You have deep experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern delivery tooling, ideally Harness or similar platforms.
• Reliability focus – You understand SRE principles, observability, and operational resilience, and apply them in real-world environments.
• Security & compliance awareness – You have experience embedding governance, audit, and regulatory controls into platform design.
• Collaborative approach – You work closely with engineering, security, and compliance teams and enjoy enabling others to succeed.
• Transformation experience – You have supported large-scale platform or cloud transformation initiatives through automation and standardisation.

What we offer

• Work life blend: we offer a safe & healthy workplace, with flexible working hours and the possibility to work from home.
• Profit share scheme: In addition to your annual salary, you may receive a profit share defined by the company’s success in the previous year.
• Global and Diverse Zühlke community: witness how colleagues from all our 16 offices across the globe come together to create a unique, positive and inclusive work culture, learning from one another at annual team camps, and celebrating year-end parties and other local festivities.
• Committed to development: we are committed to the growth of our people and are investing in your development. We’re empowering you to build the skills you need to make a positive impact, both personally and for our clients, today and in the future.

To dive deeper into local benefits of working in Zühlke follow the How to Apply.

Important: To ensure a smooth review process, please submit all application documents (CV, cover letter) in English only. If you feel you don't meet all the requirements, we are still happy to get to know you, learn more about your ambitions and ideas and look forward to receiving your application! We welcome people from all backgrounds, regardless of their gender, personality, national origin, race, religion, colour, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, disability or veteran status.