Senior Architect - Private Cloud
3 days ago
Sheffield
\n Role- Senior Architect \n Contract- 6 months rolling \n Location- Sheffield, UK \n Rate- 600 GBP/day (Inside IR35) \n\n • We are seeking an experienced Senior Architect - Private Cloud to provide hands-on technical leadership across a large-scale private cloud platform. The role will focus on shaping and evolving virtualisation, containerisation, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices capabilities to deliver secure, resilient, high-performing technology services.\n, • You will work closely with Product Owners, Architects, Platform Engineering, Application Engineering, Cyber Security, and Operations/SRE teams to translate technology strategy into practical, scalable engineering solutions.\n\n Key Responsibilities: \n\n • Define and lead architectural decisions aligned with the organisation's cloud and technology strategy.\n, • Set technical direction across private cloud capabilities, including virtualisation, Kubernetes, containers, Kafka, and microservices platforms.\n, • Design and evolve private cloud platform components covering compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and platform services.\n, • Establish engineering standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns, and technical guardrails.\n, • Provide technical leadership on Kubernetes architecture, including cluster design, multi-tenancy, networking, security, observability, upgrades, and workload onboarding.\n, • Drive automation-first deployment practices using GitOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and configuration management.\n, • Provide architectural guidance for Kafka and event-driven platforms, including resiliency, partitioning, security, governance, monitoring, and capacity planning.\n, • Coach engineering teams on microservices architecture, APIs, event contracts, resiliency, and operational readiness.\n, • Improve developer experience through golden paths, templates, self-service capabilities, and clear technical documentation.\n, • Embed security-by-design, operational excellence, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, and auditability.\n, • Work with Product Owners to shape platform roadmaps and translate business and technology requirements into actionable engineering plans.\n, • Review technical designs, challenge assumptions, and ensure solutions are secure, supportable, scalable, and cost-effective.\n, • Support improvements across development, test, and production environments to enhance reliability, performance, scalability, and operability.\n, • Communicate complex technical concepts effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders.\n\n Essential Skills & Experience: \n\n • Proven experience working as a Senior Architect, Platform Architect, Lead Engineer, or Senior/Staff Engineer within large-scale enterprise environments.\n, • Strong experience in private cloud and platform engineering.\n\n Significant expertise in at least two of the following: \n\n • Virtualisation technologies such as VMware or equivalent\n, • Containers and Kubernetes\n, • Kafka/Event Streaming platforms\n, • Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, performance tuning, fault tolerance, and capacity planning.\n, • Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automation, and configuration management.\n, • Strong understanding of production readiness, security controls, operational risk, and change management.\n, • Experience designing and implementing highly available and resilient platform solutions.\n, • Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence across Architecture, Product, Engineering, Security, and Operations.\n