Private Cloud Principal Engineer


Company:	Hays Specialist Recruitment
Salary:	£700 - £700
Hours:	Full-time
Location:	Sheffield, B4 6AJ
Job type:	Contract
Posting date:	11 Aug 2026
Closing date:	18 Aug 2026

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Summary

Private Cloud Principal Engineer - Cloud & Platform Engineering

Location: Sheffield (3 days onsite per week mandatory)

Duration: Initial 3-6 Month Contract

Rate: Up to £700 per day

Engagement: PAYE via Umbrella Only

Overview

An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced Principal Engineer to join a large-scale enterprise cloud engineering function. This role will provide technical leadership across critical platform engineering initiatives, focusing on private cloud technologies, Kubernetes, container platforms, event streaming and microservices enablement.Working closely with Product Owners, Architects, Infrastructure Engineers and Engineering teams, you will play a key role in shaping platform strategy, defining engineering standards and driving the delivery of secure, resilient and scalable cloud services. This is an excellent opportunity for a senior engineering professional who thrives on solving complex technical challenges and influencing technical direction across enterprise environments.

Key Responsibilities

Provide technical leadership across cloud and platform engineering initiatives

Define and drive engineering standards, best practices, reference architectures and platform guardrails

Act as a senior technical authority, reviewing designs and ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, supportable and cost-effective

Lead the design and evolution of platform capabilities spanning compute, storage, networking, orchestration and platform services

Work closely with Product Owners and Architects to translate strategic objectives into practical engineering solutions

Drive improvements in reliability, scalability, performance and operational excellence across multiple environments

Champion automation-first approaches through Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and platform engineering best practices

Influence platform roadmaps and engineering strategy

Kubernetes & Container Technologies

Lead architectural decisions relating to Kubernetes and container platforms

Define standards for cluster architecture, networking, multi-tenancy, securityand workload onboarding

Establish repeatable deployment patterns using GitOps, automation and configuration management

Drive platform resilience,observability and operational maturity

Support platform upgrades, governance and lifecycle management

Event Streaming & Microservices

Provide leadership across Kafka and event-driven technology platforms

Establish standards for event streaming, resiliency, monitoring and governance

Support engineering teams in adopting event-driven architectures and microservices patterns

Drive best practice around API design, domain boundaries and service resilience

Improve developer productivity through self-service capabilities, reusable templates and engineering standards

ngineering Leadership

Mentor engineering teams and promote engineering excellence

Build strong relationships across Product, Architecture, Security and Engineering functions

Drive alignment between technical strategy and delivery objectives

Produce clear technical designs and influence decision-making forums

Support operational excellence, security-by-design and risk management practices

Essential Skills & Experience

Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer or equivalent

Strong background in Cloud, Infrastructure or Platform Engineering

Deep expertise in Kubernetes and container technologies

Experience with Kafka and event streaming platforms

Strong knowledge of private cloud technologies and enterprise virtualisation platforms such as VMware

Excellent understanding of distributed systems, networking, scalability and performance engineering

Experience with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD toolsets

Strong understanding of security,governance and operational readiness

Experience operating within large-scale enterprise environments

Desirable Skills

Service Mesh technologies

API Gateway solutions

Secrets Management platforms

Policy as Code

Observability and monitoring platforms

SRE and operational excellence practices

Platform-as-a-Product environments

Developer self-service capabilities and service catalogues

Multi-region architecture and resilience design

What You'll Bring

Strong technical leadership and decision-making skills

Excellent stakeholder engagement and communication abilities

A passion for engineering excellence and platform modernisation

The ability to influence technical direction across complex environments

A pragmatic approach to solving large-scale engineering challenges

What you need to do now

If you're interested in this role, click 'apply now' to forward an up-to-date copy of your CV, or call us now.

If this job isn't quite right for you, but you are looking for a new position, please contact us for a confidential discussion about your career.

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