Principal Engineer - Software Engineering

Principal Engineer - Software Engineering (Kubernetes )

Client: BAE Systems

Location: Frimley, Surrey (hybrid 2 to 3 days onsite)

Contract: 12 months

Rate: £50 PAYE or £67.47 Umbrella

BAE Systems (Submarine Solutions) is looking for an experienced Kubernetes Principal Engineer / Platform Architect to shape the architecture and engineering standards for introducing containerised workloads into their Continuous Integration environment.

This is not a "run and operate a cluster" role. The focus is on technical leadership and platform design: defining the approach, standards and governance that will support secure, scalable adoption across teams.

What you'll be doing

Define end-to-end target architecture for CI workloads running on Kubernetes

Design workload isolation, networking, artefact flow, autoscaling and resource management

Build out a secure container supply chain approach (image build, scanning, promotion, registry design, environment separation)

Set direction on policy enforcement and secrets management integration

Establish an observability/operating model (logging, metrics, monitoring, alerting)

Create a migration strategy (candidate workloads, phased plan, risks and rollback)

Provide hands-on input into an on-prem Kubernetes environment to support experimentation, analysis and design decisions

Mentor engineers and influence delivery across a complex engineering environment

What we're looking for

Strong experience designing Kubernetes platforms (not just administering)

Hands-on background designing, building and maintaining on-prem Kubernetes clusters (ideally 5+ years)

Experience integrating Kubernetes into CI/CD / DevSecOps toolchains

Ansible and Infrastructure as Code experience

Solid Linux and IP networking knowledge

Understanding of container supply chain security

Comfortable operating at engineering leadership / architecture level

Skills: * Ability to operate at engineering leadership / architecture level * Strong experience designing Kubernetes platforms, not just operating them * Proven experience integrating Kubernetes with CI/CD systems * Experience with multi-team platform design and governance Desirable: * Experience with GitOps (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux) * Experience with cloud-native build tooling (e.g., BuildKit, Kaniko) * Familiarity with enterprise-scale engineering environments Qualifications: * (Ideally 5+ years experience) * STEM, CEng, Chartered IT Professional (CITP) ect