CTO - Head Private Cloud Principal Engineer

The Role: Head 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 andamp; 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 andamp; 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 andamp; event-driven platforms ..... full job details .....