Private Cloud Senior Architect

Anticipated Contract End Date/Length: December 25, 2026, with potential to extend Work Setup: Hybrid (3 days per week in office, 40% remote) Clearance Required: BPSS eligibility Our client in the Information Technology and Services industry is looking for a Senior Architect in Private Cloud to provide hands-on technical leadership across a private cloud platform, shaping and improving virtualisation, container, and Kubernetes capabilities while enabling resilient, secure, and high-performing services, including Kafka-based event streaming and microservices platforms. Report to the Head of Private Cloud and partner closely with Product Owners, architects, and engineering teams to translate cloud strategy into practical, well-engineered outcomes. Provide senior technical authority across platform architecture, engineering standards, security, operational excellence, and platform evolution. What you will do: Make architectural design decisions aligned with the Cloud Strategy. Set engineering direction for private cloud capabilities spanning virtualisation, containers, Kubernetes, Kafka/event streaming, and microservices enablement. Act as a senior technical authority by reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, and ensuring solutions are supportable, secure, and cost-effective. Define and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails that enable consistent delivery. Lead the end-to-end design and evolution of private cloud platform components, including compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and platform services. Drive consistent platform capabilities across development, test, and production environments to improve reliability, scalability, performance, and operability. Influence platform roadmaps with Product Owners and translate business and technology needs into actionable engineering plans. Own key decisions for Kubernetes platform design, including 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. Provide technical leadership for Kafka platform usage and enablement, including topic design patterns, partitioning strategy, resiliency, schema governance, security, monitoring, and capacity planning. Partner with architects and service teams to adopt event-driven patterns safely and consistently. Coach teams on microservices design, domain boundaries, API and event contracts, resiliency patterns, and operational readiness. Improve developer experience through templates, golden paths, self-service capabilities, and clear documentation. Embed security-by-design and operational excellence through hardening, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, data protection, and auditability. Bridge Product, Architecture, and Engineering teams to establish alignment and deliver pragmatic outcomes. Communicate complex technical topics clearly to mixed audiences and produce concise design documentation for decision forums. Build strong partnerships across Product, Architecture, Engineering, Cyber Security, Operations/SRE, and relevant governance forums. Make clear technical trade-offs, own decisions, and proactively reduce operational and security risks. Drive pragmatic outcomes, remove blockers, and raise engineering quality while maintaining delivery pace. Support faster and safer workload onboarding through repeatable patterns and self-service capabilities. Improve platform stability and performance through measurable reliability outcomes, including SLOs, reduced incidents, and faster recovery. Establish and promote clear standards for Kubernetes, Kafka, and microservices usage across engineering teams. Strengthen collaboration across Product, Architecture, and Engineering through transparent roadmaps and well-governed technical decisions. Proven experience as an Architect, Engineer, Lead Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer, or equivalent within large-scale, regulated, enterprise environments. Strong background in private cloud and platform engineering, with solid depth in at least two of the following: virtualisation technologies such as VMware or equivalent; containers and Kubernetes, including cluster operations, upgrades, networking, multi-tenancy, and policy; or Kafka/event streaming platforms covering architecture, operations, and governance. Strong engineering fundamentals across distributed systems, networking concepts, performance tuning, fault tolerance, and capacity planning. Hands-on automation mindset with experience in Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices, with tooling adaptable to the environment. Strong operational and risk awareness, including security controls, change management, and production readiness practices. Experience with service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, or policy-as-code is desirable. Practical expe…