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.

Qualifications :

• 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 experience with observability platforms covering metrics logs and traces together with incident leadership capabilities.
• Experience building platform as a product capabilities such as service catalogues self-service solutions or developer portals.
• Familiarity with multi-region or active-active architecture considerations and resilience testing.
• Ability to welcome technical challenge encourage diverse perspectives and create space for different voices in technical discussions.
• Strong partnership and influencing skills across Product Architecture Engineering Cyber Security and Operations teams.
• Ability to make clear trade-offs take ownership of technical decisions and proactively address operational and security risks.
• Pragmatic delivery-focused approach with the ability to remove blockers and improve engineering quality at pace.

Additional Information :

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Candidates must be legally authorized to live and work in the country where the position is based without requiring employer sponsorship.

HelloKindred is committed to fair transparent and inclusive hiring practices. We assess candidates based on skills experience and role-related requirements.

We appreciate your interest in this opportunity. While we review every application carefully only candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.

HelloKindred is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and do not discriminate on the basis of race colour religion sex gender identity or expression sexual orientation age national origin disability veteran status or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Contract