Principal Cloud Engineer - Azure

Principal Cloud Engineer (Azure) - Contract - Inside IR35

A leading Speciality Insurer are embarking on their cloud journey & seeking a Principal Cloud Engineer (Azure) to join their cloud platform function & act as a senior technical authority for Azure infrastructure & platform engineering. This role is infrastructure?led - focused on designing & delivering the Azure environments that support a wide range of workloads across the business.

You will work across application, platform, & architecture teams to ensure Azure foundations, patterns, & environments are secure, scalable, & ready to host anything from modern PaaS solutions to legacy IaaS workloads. This is not an application developer role; it is a senior engineering position requiring deep Azure infrastructure expertise with the ability to support many different solution types.

This role will be hybrid & requiore 3 days per week on-site in London.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deliver, & support Azure infrastructure for a broad variety of deployments including:
• Web applications
• Containerised workloads
• PaaS services
• 3rd?party & vendor?hosted applications
• Monolithic IaaS applications
• Assess incoming technical requests & define the most appropriate Azure implementation approach for each use case.
• Build & maintain secure, scalable, resilient Azure environments aligned to cloud best practice & enterprise landing zone standards.
• Engineer infrastructure using Terraform, creating reusable modules & automation patterns.
• Use Azure DevOps for repositories, branching, pipelines, & release orchestration.
• Support engineering teams with environment setup, deployment approaches, cloud adoption, & design interpretation.
• Collaborate closely with architecture & security teams to ensure alignment with organisational standards.
• Provide senior technical leadership & help uplift cloud engineering capability across the team.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Deep hands?on Azure infrastructure engineering across networking, identity, compute, storage, security, & governance.
• Broad experience deploying & supporting diverse workload types (PaaS, containers, 3rd?party apps, monolithic IaaS, web applications, etc.).
• Ability to understand application requirements from an infrastructure perspective & design the right Azure platform components to support them.
• Expert Terraform experience (module development, IaC patterns, automation).
• Practical experience with Azure DevOps pipelines & repos.
• Excellent communication, architectural thinking, & stakeholder engagement skills.
• Proven experience operating at a senior or principal engineering level.
• Experience with on?prem to cloud migration (beneficial but not required).
• Azure certifications (AZ?305, AZ?104, AZ?700, AZ?400).
• Broader architecture frameworks such as TOGAF.

If you have the relevant experience & knowledge, please contact me for an immediate review.