Scottish Water
Principal Digital Specialist (Cloud Architect)
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Cloud Architect
Shape the Future of Scottish Water’s Cloud Hosting and Platform Capabilities
About the Role
As Cloud Architect, you’ll lead the cloud hosting architecture for Scottish Water’s transition journey, from assessing application hosting needs, to defining landing zone patterns, to specifying Azure services for networking, identity, security, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery and platform services. You’ll help teams choose the right approach: rehost, replatform, refactor or rebuild, balancing delivery pace with long-term sustainability and operational excellence.
This role is ideal for an experienced infrastructure or cloud architect who can translate hosting requirements into clear, deployable Azure architectures, standards and implementation guidance.
What You'll Be Doing
- Define Azure hosting architectures for core systems by producing reference architectures for IaaS hosting, including virtual machines, storage, connectivity, backup, disaster recovery, patching and monitoring.
- Define when IaaS is the right fit versus PaaS, ensuring hosting decisions are secure, resilient, supportable and cost-effective.
- Design cloud networking and connectivity patterns by specifying designs for hub-and-spoke networking, routing, firewalling, private endpoints, DNS and hybrid connectivity.
- Work with Networks, Platforms and Cyber Security teams to ensure Azure connectivity patterns are practical, secure and maintainable.
- Enable cloud-native delivery through PaaS patterns by defining standard patterns using services such as App Service, Functions, API Management, Service Bus, Event Grid, Key Vault, managed databases and secure integration services.
- Create golden paths, reusable templates and platform standards so delivery teams can build consistent cloud solutions faster.
- Govern and assure cloud designs across programmes by providing architectural assurance for project designs and ensuring alignment with Scottish Water standards for security, resilience, supportability and cost management.
- Work closely with Cyber Security to help embed controls for identity, logging, threat detection, encryption, secrets management and vulnerability management.
- Turn requirements into clear architecture outputs, including standards, patterns, high-level designs and implementation guidance.
- Document as-is and to-be architectures for change programmes to support delivery alignment, partner engagement and governance.
- Partner with Platforms, Enterprise Architecture, Networks, Cyber Security and delivery teams to help remove blockers and get designs implemented pragmatically.
- Engage vendors and partners where needed, ensuring designs are achievable, maintainable and aligned to Scottish Water’s long-term platform direction.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
What You'll Bring
- Strong experience designing Azure infrastructure for business-critical workloads.
- A solid grounding in IaaS architecture, including compute, storage, networking, identity, backup and disaster recovery.
- A good understanding of cloud security fundamentals, including identity and access, network segmentation, encryption, logging, monitoring and vulnerability management.
- Ability to translate business and technical requirements into clear architecture outputs, standards, patterns and implementation guidance.
- Confidence influencing both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- The judgement to balance delivery pace, operational risk and long-term platform sustainability.
- A pragmatic, collaborative mindset and the ability to work effectively with internal teams, delivery partners and vendors.
Experience
- Modernising legacy estates.
- Guiding migration choices.
- Working with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Bicep or Terraform.
- Applying policy guardrails.
- Standardising environments.
- Operating in regulated or critical national infrastructure environments.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
What We Offer
- A collaborative and future-focused digital organisation.
- The chance to make a tangible impact on how Scottish Water hosts, secures and operates the platforms that support essential services.
- Family-friendly policies around adoption, maternity, and parental leave.
- Flexible working.
- Pension and life assurance.
- Participation in a company bonus scheme.
- Access to SW Splash – handy rewards that can save you money on holidays, bills, and shopping.
The not-so-small print
- Grade 8 role.
- Starting salary of £54,776, with potential to progress to a maximum of £74,386.
- Applications accepted until midnight on 15th October 2026.
- Balanced Hybrid working at Scottish Water, encouraging people to work half their time in a Scottish Water location.
- Job offers conditional upon completion of pre-employment screening.
- Valid UK driving licence required for driving on Scottish Water business and claiming business mileage expenses.
- Drug & Alcohol testing may be required in line with company policy.
- Records of candidates who haven’t submitted an application in the last 12 months will be automatically deleted from the recruitment database.
Important Information
- If you’re interested in this job, but don’t meet every criteria, apply anyway!
- Let us know if there are any changes we can make to our recruitment process to help you perform at your best.
- It’s important that all our employees are Scottish taxpayers. If you join us, your home address will need to be in Scotland. If you don’t already live here, you'll need to commit to moving here within your first three months.
We’re here to help. Ask us anything at SWRecruitment@ScottishWater.co.uk
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London