CTO - Private Cloud Principal Engineer

The Role: Private Cloud Principal Engineer Location: Sheffield, UK Position Type: Contract Inside IR35 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. * 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: hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability. * Work as a bridge between Product, Architecture and Engineering—getting alignment without boiling the ocean. * Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences; write crisp design docs and influence decision forums. 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. To be successful in this role, you should meet the following 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