Vallum Associates
CTO - Private Cloud Principal Engineer
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The Role: Private Cloud Principal Engineer
Location: Sheffield, UK
Position Type: Contract Inside IR35
Implementation Partner – HSBC
Remote work option Available: Hybrid – 3 Days Onsite
Job Description
Key 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.
Kubernetes & container platform
- 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 GitOps/CI/CD, configuration management, and automation-first approaches.
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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:
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Hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.
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Work as a bridge between Product, Architecture and Engineering—getting alignment without boiling the ocean.
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Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences; write crisp design docs and influence decision forums.
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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.
Requirements
- 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.
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Jessica, London
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