Principal Cloud Engineer (Azure)

As a Principal Cloud Engineer, you are the senior technical authority for cloud engineering behind our large-scale SaaS platform — thousands of customer environments under stringent 24/7 availability and performance requirements. You form and drive the cloud technical strategy with the Director of Cloud & Developer Operations, and lead through expertise and influence: guiding architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and holding coherent technical direction across teams — not owning the cloud function organisationally. 

This is the most senior individual-contributor cloud role in the Deploy, Run & Optimize lane — our CloudOps and DevOps function. You lead the hardest cross-team cloud initiatives and infrastructure transformation, and you bring our AI-native ways of working into how the platform is built, operated, and remediated — agents and bounded automation with observability, approvals, containment, and rollback, not just runbooks. You are here to take our technology to the next level. 

What this is not: A detached architect removed from production, or a people-management role. This is principal-level technical leadership — hands-on in the estate, setting the direction other engineers build on. 

Set cloud strategy and architecture 

• Form and execute the cloud technical strategy with the Director of Cloud & Developer Operations, who retains accountability for organisational priorities, budget, people, reliability outcomes, and the operating model. 

• Define reference architectures, standards, and reusable patterns; guide architectural decisions and hold coherent technical direction across teams, in partnership with the Chief Architect. 

• Apply Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and Well-Architected Framework (WAF) thinking; design for scalability, including the SQL data estate beneath the platform. 

Drive transformation 

• Take end-to-end technical ownership of infrastructure transformation projects — cloud modernisation, efficiency, and FinOps initiatives. 

• Drive strategic cloud initiatives and major transformation efforts, and push the boundaries of scale, resilience, and efficiency. 

• Bring AI-native operations into the lane — agents, bounded automation, and evals, with observability, approvals, containment, and rollback — so reliability and efficiency scale faster than headcount. 

Lead and mentor 

• Mentor engineers on architecture, best practices, and complex problem-solving. 

• Lead critical technical discussions and champion innovation; strengthen cross-team collaboration. 

• Define and publish standards — make implicit expectations explicit and inspectable. 

Partner and operate 

• Partner with business stakeholders so cloud solutions directly support TOPdesk's strategic objectives. 

• Refine operational processes so we stay both agile and highly reliable, and support 24/7 continuity of service (including a shared stand-by rotation). 

• Identify dependencies early and cooperate with other engineering and non-cloud teams toward shared goals.