Senior Architect Private Cloud

Role: Senior Architect - Private Cloud
Location: Sheffield, UK (Hybrid: 2 days/week on-site)
Duration: 6 Months (Inside IR35)
Experience Level: 10+ YearsRole Overview

We are seeking a Senior Private Cloud Architect to define, design, and drive the evolution of our enterprise private cloud infrastructure. You will provide hands-on technical leadership across container platforms, event streaming architectures, and virtualization environments, ensuring our platforms are secure, resilient, scalable, and developer-friendly.

Key Responsibilities

Architectural Strategy & Standards: Define the private cloud roadmap aligned with broader enterprise goals. Establish reference architectures, engineering standards, reusable design patterns, and platform guardrails.
Kubernetes Platform Leadership: Own the end-to-end Kubernetes ecosystem, including cluster topology, multi-tenancy, ingress, service mesh, secrets management, observability, and seamless workload onboarding.
Event-Driven Architecture: Direct the adoption and governance of Apache Kafka, covering partitioning strategies, schema management, resilience patterns, capacity planning, and security.
Platform Engineering & Automation: Drive GitOps, IaC, and CI/CD standardization. Enhance developer experience by creating self-service golden paths, developer portals, and automated platform capabilities.
Security & Operational Resilience: Implement Security-by-Design principles, policy-as-code, vulnerability management, and robust RBAC. Ensure production readiness across multi-region, high-availability environments.
Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborate across Product, Cyber Security, SRE, and CTO domains to influence technical decision-making and mentor engineering teams.Key Requirements

Core Expertise: 10+ years in platform architecture/engineering with deep hands-on expertise in at least two of the following: Kubernetes/Containers, Kafka/Event Streaming, or VMware/Virtualization.
Distributed Systems: Proven background in designing secure, fault-tolerant, high-performance distributed systems within regulated enterprise environments.
DevOps & IaC: Practical experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and configuration management.
Desirable Skills: Familiarity with Service Mesh (e.g., Istio), API Gateways, Policy as Code (e.g., OPA), developer portals (Platform-as-a-Product), and Observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, ELK).

Randstad Technologies is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy
Only candidates based in UK and eligible to work in UK are allowed