Principal Cloud Engineer

Commify · Nottingham · £70/hr (stated in the posting)

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At Commify, we're not just a company, we're a globally connected team of innovators who love what we do. As a CPaaS leader with 25 years of groundbreaking experience, we're the force behind over 5 billion customer interactions each year, enabling businesses worldwide to connect via advanced channels like SMS, RCS, and complex mobile journeys.

Our culture is our core strength. Operating across the UK, EMEA, the USA, and Australia, we've fostered a truly diverse and connected environment, earning a consistent 4 out of 5 culture score in our employee engagement surveys. You'll join a vibrant team where your diverse experience makes a daily global impact.

We need talented people to grow a global company where everyone feels proud to belong, have a purpose and do their best to directly shape the digital future.

The Principal DevOps Engineer will be the senior technical voice within the team, driving design and architecture conversations, proposing solutions, and challenging the team to raise its technical standards.

Requirements

The Role:

• Develop and maintain Terraform modules for Azure core services and enforce IaC standards across providers.
• Deploy and manage AKS clusters with GitOps, implement Istio service mesh, lead CIS security hardening, and create centralised Helm charts for consistency.
• Design networking architecture including hub VNets, Azure Firewall policies, and DNS configurations with thorough documentation.
• Implement Identity and Security measures including PIM, RBAC, CI/CD credential management, container security, and compliance preparation.
• Modernise CI/CD with reusable workflows, template repositories, provider-agnostic tooling, automated versioning, and integrated security scanning.
• Set up observability with Loki, Grafana Alloy, and tracing; integrate FinOps practices for cost-aware infrastructure and capacity planning.
• Improve Developer Experience by building automation tools, creating onboarding resources, and providing technical mentorship.
• Post-production, focus on technical support, roadmap design, and adopting enterprise best practices including ArgoCD, Cilium, Argo Rollouts, KEDA, Falco, Kyverno, DAPR, and multi-tenant AKS designs.

The Person:

The successful candidate will be an exceptional engineer with a proven track record of delivering cloud platforms at scale. They will combine deep technical expertise with the ability to communicate architectural decisions to stakeholders at all levels, from development teams to C-suite.

• Azure at Scale: Expert in designing Azure landing zones, multi-subscription architectures, hub-spoke networking, and key Azure services (Firewall, Front Door, App Service, Key Vault, Entra ID, PIM).
• Kubernetes/AKS: Deep production experience managing AKS or similar, including cluster lifecycle, upgrades, RBAC, network policies, and security hardening.
• Terraform: Expert module development, state management, CI/CD integration, and multi-region/provider codebase management.
• Service Mesh: Hands-on with Istio (ambient mode preferred) or Cilium for mTLS, traffic management, Gateway API, and zero-trust networking.
• GitOps & Continuous Delivery: Experience with ArgoCD or equivalent, transitioning teams to GitOps methodologies.
• CI/CD Engineering: Strong with GitHub Actions workflows, Azure DevOps Pipelines, and migrating CI platforms.
• Networking: Expert in Azure networking (VNets, NSGs, DNS, hub-spoke topology, firewall design).
• Security: Practical shift-left security experience including container scanning, image signing, CIS benchmarks, and pen test readiness.
• Helm: Skilled in authoring and maintaining Helm charts for standardized multi-language app deployment.
• Linux & Containers: Strong Linux knowledge, container lifecycle management, Dockerfile optimization, and registry management.
• Scripting & Tooling: Proficient in Bash and Python for automation and creating internal CLI tools.
• Architecture: Experience creating HLDs, LLDs, architectural decisions; leading technical discussions with clear trade-offs.
• Communication: Effective stakeholder communication from developers to C-suite, translating technical decisions into business context.
• Mentorship: Proven ability as a technical escalation point and mentor for diverse engineering teams.
• Greenfield Delivery: Experience designing and delivering cloud platforms from scratch, ideally with regulatory/compliance considerations.

Desirable

• Go programming for internal tooling and CLI frameworks (Cobra, Kong).
• Argo Rollouts for blue/green and canary deployments.
• KEDA, Karpenter, or similar autoscaling and cluster right-sizing tools.

Core Competencies

• AI Literacy & Tool Fluency: Ability to navigate, evaluate, and adopt domain-specific AI tools (e.g. generative text/image tools, enterprise copilots, automated analytics) to streamline daily work.
• Workflows & Prompting: Skill in structuring clear inputs and contexts to extract accurate, high-value outputs from AI platforms, converting machine results into actionable business deliverables.
• Output Validation & Quality Control: Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated outputs for accuracy, hallucination, bias, relevance, and alignment with organisational standards before final execution.

Required Behaviours & Mindset

• Adaptive Curiosity: Actively seeks opportunities to learn new workplace approved tech, experimenting with AI capabilities to solve everyday operational friction.
• Data Responsibility & Ethical Awareness: Adheres strictly to company data privacy standards, AI Policy guardrails, ensuring sensitive customer, financial, or IP data is never entered into unvetted tools.
• Automation-First Thinking: Regularly identifies repetitive, low-value tasks within their workflow that can be automated or accelerated, redirecting time towards strategic execution.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary (£70 - 80,000)
• Company Bonus
• Comprehensive healthcare cash plan
• A generous 27 days of annual leave in addition to Bank Holidays
• 2 Wellbeing leave days and 2 days dedicated to giving back to your community
• Enjoy your birthday off!
• Employer pension contribution at 5%
• Death in service benefit (4 times your salary)
• Annual award recognition
• Fun monthly and quarterly social events
• Opportunities for training and professional development
• Flexible hybrid working arrangements

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