CTO - Cloud Engineering - Private Cloud Senior Architect
2 days ago
Sheffield
\n The Role: CTO - Cloud Engineering - Private Cloud Senior Architect \n Location: Sheffield, UK \n Position Type: Contract Inside IR35 \n Remote work option Available: Hybrid - 2 days in a week \n Job Description: \n Key responsibilities \n\n • Architectural design decisions in line with Client Cloud Strategy\n, • Set engineering direction for private cloud capabilities spanning virtualisation, containers, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices enablement.\n, • Act as a senior technical authority, review designs, challenge assumptions, and ensure solutions are supportable, secure, and cost-effective.\n, • Define and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, patterns and guardrails (think: paved roads, not speed bumps ).\n, • Lead the end-to-end design and evolution of private cloud platform components (compute, storage, networking, orchestration, platform services).\n, • Drive consistent platform capabilities across environments (dev/test/prod), improving reliability, scalability, performance and operability.\n, • Influence platform roadmaps with Product Owners; translate business and technology needs into actionable engineering plans.\n, • Kubernetes & container platform\n, • Own key decisions around Kubernetes platform design: cluster architecture, multi-tenancy, ingress, service mesh (where applicable), policy, secrets, observability, upgrade strategies, and workload onboarding.\n, • Establish repeatable deployment patterns using GitOps/CI/CD, configuration management, and automation-first approaches.\n, • Kafka & event-driven platforms\n, • Provide technical leadership on Kafka platform usage and enablement (topic design patterns, partitioning strategy, resiliency, schema governance, security, monitoring and capacity planning).\n, • Partner with architects and service teams to adopt event-driven patterns safely and consistently.\n, • Coach teams on microservices design, domain boundaries, API/event contracts, resiliency patterns, and operational readiness.\n, • Improve developer experience through templates, golden paths, self-service capabilities, and clear documentation.\n, • Embed security-by-design and operational excellence: hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability.\n, • Work as a bridge between Product, Architecture and Engineering-getting alignment without boiling the ocean.\n, • Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences; write crisp design docs and influence decision forums.\n\n Key relationships: \n\n • Reports to: Head of Private Cloud\n\n\n, • Works closely with: Product Owners, CTO Architects, Platform/Infrastructure Engineering, Application Engineering teams, Cyber Security, Operations/SRE, and relevant governance forums.\n\n To be successful in this role, you should meet the following requirements: \n\n • Proven experience as an Architect/Engineer/Lead Engineer/Senior Staff Engineer (or equivalent) in large-scale, regulated, enterprise environments.\n, • Strong background in private cloud/platform engineering, including solid depth in at least two of: Virtualisation technologies (eg, VMware or equivalent), Containers & Kubernetes (cluster operations, upgrades, networking, multi-tenancy, policy), Kafka/event streaming platforms (architecture, operations, governance)\n, • Strong engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, networking concepts, performance tuning, fault tolerance and capacity planning.\n, • Automation mindset with experience in Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices (tooling can vary).\n, • Strong operational and risk awareness: security controls, change management, and production readiness practices.\n\n Desirable skills: \n\n • Service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, policy-as-code.\n, • Observability platforms (metrics/logs/traces) and practical incident leadership.\n, • Experience building platform as a product capabilities (service catalogue, self-service, developer portals).\n, • Experience with multi-region/active-active design considerations and resilience testing.\n