Job Specifications
Role: Enterprise Infrastructure Principal Engineer
Location: Sheffield, UK (3 Days hybrid)
Job Type: Contract - Inside IR35
Note: No Sponsorship
Details:
Provide senior-level technical leadership across enterprise infrastructure. Define architectural direction, reduce systemic risks, and improve reliability, security, and developer productivity. Act as a trusted advisor influencing decisions across teams and supporting leadership with informed trade-offs.
Key Responsibilities
Architecture Leadership
Define standards, patterns, and technical roadmaps
Create and maintain design documents and RFCs
Align solutions with enterprise architecture, security, compliance, and cost constraints
Resolve cross-team architectural challenges using data-driven decisions
Reliability & Security
Enhance incident management, postmortems, and change processes
Establish reliability metrics and risk dashboards
Lead capacity planning and disaster recovery validation
Execution & Delivery
Drive key infrastructure initiatives such as platform modernization, IaC standardization, CI/CD improvements, and cost optimization
Deliver measurable outcomes (e.g., reduced MTTR, fewer deployment failures, optimized cloud spend)
Platform Enablement
Define ownership models and standard patterns
Promote self-service infrastructure and “golden paths”
Reduce ad-hoc solutions and escalations
Governance & Collaboration
Work closely with infrastructure, security, and application teams
Engage with architecture and governance forums
Influence outcomes without direct authority
Mentorship
Guide senior and staff engineers through design reviews
Improve overall design quality and documentation standards
Communication
Clearly present complex technical concepts and trade-offs to leadership
Operate effectively in large-scale, ambiguous environments
Required Skills & Experience
Strong expertise in enterprise infrastructure: networking, IAM, CI/CD, observability, and security tooling
Experience with cloud platforms, container orchestration, and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform)
Solid understanding of SRE/DevOps principles
Ability to identify hidden system risks, legacy issues, and improve system design through simplification
Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives without direct reporting authority
Strong documentation and communication skills (design docs, standards, runbooks, executive summaries)
Nice to Have
12+ years of experience in infrastructure/platform engineering
5+ years in architect/principal-level roles
Experience in regulated environments
Certifications such as AWS/Azure Architect, CISSP/CISM, or TOGAF
Key Stakeholders
Infrastructure and platform leadership teams
Security teams
Application and product teams
Architecture and governance boards
Working Model
Hybrid working model
Occasional travel required to multiple office locations
Flexible working arrangements based on business needs