Principal Cloud Engineer

Principal Cloud Engineer (VMware)

Near Cardiff (Hybrid Working)
£60,000 + Bonus + Excellent Benefits

Own the Platform. Drive Automation. Shape the Future.

Are you an experienced Cloud Infrastructure Engineer looking for a role where you can genuinely influence technical direction rather than simply maintain existing systems?

We're working with an established and growing technology business near Cardiff that is investing in its infrastructure and platform services. As a Principal Cloud Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability, resilience and performance of critical business platforms while driving automation, improving operational efficiency and helping shape engineering best practice.

This is a hands-on technical position with plenty of autonomy, giving you the opportunity to lead by example, solve complex technical challenges and influence how the platform evolves.

What You'll Be Doing

As a Principal Cloud Engineer, you'll:

• Take ownership of the operational health, availability and performance of the platform estate.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for complex platform and infrastructure issues.
• Lead technical investigations and major incident recovery.
• Drive automation to reduce manual processes and improve operational efficiency.
• Develop and maintain monitoring, observability and alerting using tools such as Grafana.
• Coordinate the day-to-day priorities of the Platform Engineering team.
• Maintain engineering standards, documentation and operational procedures.
• Support infrastructure upgrades, migrations, platform optimisation and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of new platform capabilities.
• Help deliver highly resilient, reliable infrastructure supporting business-critical services.

What We're Looking For

Essential

• Strong commercial experience as a Principal Cloud Engineer, Platform Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer or similar.
• Excellent VMware vSphere / ESXi administration experience.
• Strong Hyper-V experience.
• Hands-on experience with Veeam Backup & Replication.
• Experience supporting highly available production infrastructure.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills across enterprise infrastructure.
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms such as Grafana.
• Experience automating operational tasks using PowerShell, scripting or similar technologies.
• Excellent understanding of backup, disaster recovery and platform resilience.
• Ability to coordinate technical workloads and mentor engineers within a collaborative team.

Desirable

Experience with any of the following would be advantageous but is not essential:

Zerto, Cohesity, OpsRamp, Microsoft 365 Backup, Workflow automation tools such as n8n, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ITIL environments, Managed Service Provider (MSP) experience, Customer onboarding and service transition

Why Join?

You'll be joining a collaborative engineering team where your technical expertise will genuinely influence how platforms are operated and improved.

This is an excellent opportunity for someone who enjoys solving complex infrastructure challenges, driving automation, improving reliability and helping shape engineering standards within a modern technology environment.

Benefits

• Hybrid working
• Annual bonus
• Excellent benefits package
• Modern technology environment
• High levels of technical ownership
• Opportunities to influence platform strategy and engineering best practice
• Ongoing professional development

If you're an experienced a Principal Cloud Engineer or Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer looking for your next challenge and want to work in an environment where your ideas and technical expertise will make a real impact, we'd love to hear from you.