Principal Cloud Engineer (Azure)

About the role

TOPdesk builds service management software used across education, healthcare, government and manufacturing, with about 700 colleagues in 11 offices worldwide. As Principal Cloud Engineer you are the senior technical authority for cloud engineering behind its large-scale SaaS platform, which serves thousands of customer environments under strict 24/7 availability and performance requirements. You form and drive the cloud technical strategy with the Director of Cloud & Developer Operations, guide architectural decisions, mentor engineers and hold coherent technical direction across teams, without owning the cloud function organisationally. The role sits in the Deploy, Run & Optimize lane of the CloudOps and DevOps function.

Key responsibilities

• Set cloud strategy and architecture: define reference architectures, standards and reusable patterns, and guide architectural decisions together with the Chief Architect.
• Apply Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and Well-Architected Framework (WAF) thinking, designing for scalability including the SQL data estate.
• Drive infrastructure transformation, cloud modernisation, efficiency and FinOps initiatives, bringing AI-native operations such as agents, bounded automation and evals with observability, approvals, containment and rollback.
• Mentor engineers on architecture and best practices, lead technical discussions and strengthen cross-team collaboration.
• Define and publish standards, partner with business stakeholders, refine operational processes and support 24/7 continuity of service, including a shared stand-by rotation.

Required profile

• At least 7 years as a cloud engineer with Azure.
• Hands-on technical leader who drives major cloud transformations and unites stakeholders.
• At least 3 years with Terraform via CI/CD.
• Experience with CAF and WAF, and setting up (SQL) databases for scalability.
• Proactive, able to lead and identify dependencies early; strong communicator, comfortable with occasional stand-by shifts (evenings or weekends).
• Nice to have: Azure certifications, personal practice of AI-native software delivery (Claude Code or equivalent), experience with EU data residency / sovereign cloud requirements.

Required skills

• Azure networking, compute and storage at multi-tenant SaaS scale, Kubernetes / Azure AKS
• Terraform via CI/CD, Puppet and Ansible
• Observability stacks such as Influx, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana and Nagios
• Python and automation tooling

The team works in agile, two-week sprints in Delft, reporting to the Director of Cloud & Developer Operations. To apply, submit your CV and a short motivation letter through the application form, describing how you have driven innovation and delivered technical improvements.