Queen Square Recruitment
Principal Engineer
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Private Cloud Principal Engineer
đź’° ÂŁ600/day (Inside IR35) đź“Ť Sheffield, UK (2 days onsite)
đź“… 12-Month Contract
Our client is looking for a Private Cloud Principal Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across a large-scale private cloud platform within a highly regulated enterprise environment. You’ll shape and evolve private cloud capabilities across virtualisation, Kubernetes, containers, Kafka and microservices, while driving platform reliability, security, scalability and engineering excellence. Working closely with Product Owners, Architects, Platform Engineering, Cyber Security and SRE teams, you’ll act as a senior technical authority and help turn technology strategy into practical, well-engineered outcomes.
Key Responsibilities
- Set technical direction across private cloud, Kubernetes, containers, Kafka and microservices platforms.
- Lead the design and evolution of private cloud compute, storage, networking and orchestration capabilities.
- Define engineering standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns and platform guardrails.
- Own key Kubernetes architecture decisions including cluster design, networking, multi-tenancy, security, observability and upgrades.
- Establish automated deployment patterns using GitOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code.
- Provide technical leadership for Kafka/event-streaming architecture, resilience, security, capacity and governance.
- Coach engineering teams on microservices, APIs, event contracts, resiliency and operational readiness.
- Drive developer experience through golden paths, templates, self-service capabilities and platform automation.
- Embed security-by-design, operational readiness, vulnerability management and production resilience.
- Influence platform roadmaps and communicate technical decisions to senior Product, Architecture and Engineering stakeholders.
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What We're Looking For
- Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer or equivalent experience in a large-scale enterprise environment.
- Strong private cloud/platform engineering experience.
- Deep expertise in Kubernetes and container platforms.
- Strong experience with Kafka/event streaming and/or enterprise virtualisation technologies such as VMware.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, resilience, performance and capacity planning.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and automation.
- Strong understanding of production readiness, security controls and operational risk.
- Experience working across Architecture, Product, Engineering, Cyber Security and SRE teams.
- Excellent technical communication and stakeholder management skills.
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Desirable
- Service mesh, API gateways, secrets management or policy-as-code.
- Observability across metrics, logs and traces.
- Platform-as-a-Product, developer portals or self-service platforms.
- Multi-region/active-active architecture and resilience testing.
- Experience in highly regulated environments such as banking or financial services
Please apply with your CV and we'll be in touch shortly. Thanks!
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