Principal Cloud Engineer - Azure

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

You will work across application, platform, and architecture teams to ensure Azure foundations, patterns, and environments are secure, scalable, and 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 and requiore 3 days per week on-site in London.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deliver, and support Azure infrastructure for a broad variety of deployments including:

• Web applications

• Containerised workloads

• PaaS services

• 3rd-party and vendor-hosted applications

• Monolithic IaaS applications

Assess incoming technical requests and define the most appropriate Azure implementation approach for each use case.

Build and maintain secure, scalable, resilient Azure environments aligned to cloud best practice and enterprise landing zone standards.

Engineer infrastructure using Terraform, creating reusable modules and automation patterns.

Use Azure DevOps for repositories, branching, pipelines, and release orchestration.

Support engineering teams with environment setup, deployment approaches, cloud adoption, and design interpretation.

Collaborate closely with architecture and security teams to ensure alignment with organisational standards.

Provide senior technical leadership and help uplift cloud engineering capability across the team.

• Deep hands-on Azure infrastructure engineering across networking, identity, compute, storage, security, and governance.
• Broad experience deploying and supporting diverse workload types (PaaS, containers, 3rd-party apps, monolithic IaaS, web applications, etc.).
• Ability to understand application requirements from an infrastructure perspective and design the right Azure platform components to support them.
• Expert Terraform experience (module development, IaC patterns, automation).
• Practical experience with Azure DevOps pipelines and repos.
• Excellent communication, architectural thinking, and 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.