Principal Engineer - Private Cloud

Role Overview

Principal Engineer – Private Cloud to provide hands-on technical leadership across its private cloud platform.

The role will focus on virtualisation, Kubernetes, containers, Kafka/event streaming and microservices , ensuring secure, resilient and high-performing enterprise platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and define engineering standards for private cloud platforms.
• Design and evolve compute, storage, networking, containers and Kubernetes capabilities.
• Lead Kubernetes architecture covering cluster design, networking, multi-tenancy, security, policy, secrets, observability and upgrades .
• Establish GitOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code and automation-first deployment practices.
• Provide technical leadership for Kafka/event streaming , including partitioning, resiliency, security, monitoring and capacity planning.
• Guide teams on microservices, APIs, event-driven architecture and resilience patterns .
• Drive platform self-service, golden paths, templates and developer experience.
• Ensure security-by-design, operational readiness, vulnerability management and access controls .
• Work closely with Product Owners, Architects, Engineering, Cyber Security and SRE/Operations teams.
• Review technical designs and influence platform roadmaps and engineering decisions.

Mandatory Skills

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer or equivalent.
• Strong experience in Private Cloud / Platform Engineering .
• Strong expertise in at least two of the following: VMware / Virtualisation Kubernetes & Containers Kafka / Event Streaming
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, networking, performance, fault tolerance and capacity planning .
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and automation .
• Strong understanding of security, risk, change management and production readiness .
• Experience working within large-scale, regulated enterprise environments .

Desirable Skills

• Service Mesh, API Gateways and Secrets Management.
• Policy-as-Code.
• Observability – metrics, logs and traces .
• Platform-as-a-Product / Developer Portals / Self-Service Platforms.
• Multi-region / Active-Active architecture.
• Resilience and disaster recovery testing.

Ideal Candidate

A strong Principal/Lead Platform or Cloud Engineer with deep hands-on experience in Kubernetes, Private Cloud, VMware and/or Kafka , combined with enterprise architecture, automation, security and technical leadership experience.