Principal Cloud Architect

3 Month intial contract, scope for extension

Inside IR35, 550-600 a day

Location: Southampton - 2 x a week on site

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Principal Cloud Platform Engineer with strong DevOps leadership capability to support the design, delivery and continuous improvement of secure, scalable and resilient cloud platforms across Azure and AWS environments. The role will focus on building and governing cloud architecture patterns, landing zones, infrastructure standards and automation practices, while working closely with engineering, security, product and delivery teams.
The successful candidate will provide manager-level technical leadership across DevOps, cloud platforms, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, networking, security, observability and reliability engineering. They will help shape enterprise-scale transformation, hybrid cloud strategy and platform services aligned to the Azure Well-Architected Framework, ensuring solutions are robust, cost-effective and operationally ready.

Own and evolve Azure & AWS cloud architecture, platform patterns, guardrails, and design principles. Provide architectural oversight across Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions), networking patterns, and compute/storage design. Evaluate platform changes including major provider upgrades (AzureRM / Cloudflare), DR and high availability improvements, cost optimisation strategies, and observability frameworks.

Lead technical designs for large-scale refactoring and provider upgrades, environment creation pipelines, secure container registry access, identity integration and Zero Trust patterns, and event-driven architectures with caching strategies. Drive Cloudflare integration (CDN, WAF, edge, traffic management) aligned to Azure networking and security architecture.

Provide engineering governance through review of RFCs, design documents, and technical decisions, and collaborate with delivery teams, security, shared services, and product groups to maintain aligned architecture.

Requires 8-12+ years in cloud engineering/architecture, with deep expertise in Azure architecture (networking, App Services, Functions, APIM, PaaS, ACR, VNets, Private Endpoints, identity/security), strong Terraform experience (modules, pipelines, state management), and strong CI/CD background.

Experience designing for SRE (DR, failover, monitoring, logging, autoscaling, resilience) and working across multiple engineering teams. Previous Cloudflare experience preferred.

Architecture-led platform role (not a pure Solution Architect); deep scripting expertise not a primary requirement.