Senior Architect - Private Cloud

Role- Senior Architect Contract- 6 months rolling Location- Sheffield, UK Rate- 600 GBP/day (Inside IR35) 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. 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. Key Responsibilities: Define and lead architectural decisions aligned with the organisation''s cloud and technology strategy. Set technical direction across private cloud capabilities, including virtualisation, Kubernetes, containers, Kafka, and microservices platforms. Design and evolve private cloud platform components covering compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and platform services. Establish engineering standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns, and technical guardrails. Provide technical leadership on Kubernetes architecture, including cluster design, multi-tenancy, networking, security, observability, upgrades, and workload onboarding. Drive automation-first deployment practices using GitOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and configuration management. Provide ..... full job details .....