Principal Cloud Architect

3 Month intial contract, scope for extensionInside IR35, (Apply online only) a dayLocation: Southampton - 2 x a week on site Role OverviewWe are seeking an experienced Principal Cloud Platform Engineer with strong DevOps leadership capability to support the design, delivery and continuous improvement of secure, scalable and resilient cloud platforms across Azure and AWS environments. The role will focus on building and governing cloud architecture patterns, landing zones, infrastructure standards and automation practices, while working closely with engineering, security, product and delivery teams. The successful candidate will provide manager-level technical leadership across DevOps, cloud platforms, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, networking, security, observability and reliability engineering. They will help shape enterprise-scale transformation, hybrid cloud strategy and platform services aligned to the Azure Well-Architected Framework, ensuring solutions are robust, cost-effective and operationally ready. Own and evolve Azure and AWS cloud architecture, platform patterns, guardrails, and design principles. Provide architectural oversight across Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions), networking patterns, and compute/storage design. Evaluate platform changes including major provider upgrades (AzureRM / Cloudflare), DR and high availability improvements, cost optimisation strategies, and observability frameworks. Lead technical designs for ..... full job details .....