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.