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