Principal Cloud Architect

Role Description

Prototype and Hand Off:

• Design platform patterns end-to-end—build reference implementations, document the rationale, and partner with implementation teams to roll them out.
• Stay hands-on through proof-of-concept and initial enablement, writing reference implementations and opening PRs to jumpstart team adoption.

Participate in Architecture Review:

• Bring a consistent, documented rubric to weekly architecture reviews so teams get reliable guidance.
• Expand our standards library and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).

Own a Domain Specialty:

• Provide architectural stewardship in one of our focus areas:
• Cloud Infrastructure Architecture:
• Own the architecture for our cloud runtime, networking, service mesh, container platforms, and overall infrastructure scalability, resilience, and security.
• Data Architecture:
• Own event streaming/messaging, database technology strategy, pipeline patterns, warehouse, and lakehouse strategies.

Define Technology Lifecycle:

• Evaluate emerging technologies through structured POCs, drive standards for onboarding and phase-out, and lead evaluations of vendor changes and consolidation opportunities.
• Partner with FinOps on cost optimization in your depth area, including emerging AI/model infrastructure spend (e.g., evaluating open-weight models as a lower-cost alternative to hosted APIs).

Enable R&D Teams:

• Host design reviews and workshops.
• Serve as a technical consultant to engineering teams making complex infrastructure choices.
• Make patterns consumable and self-service so teams don't reinvent the wheel.

Shape Multi-Year Strategy:

• Contribute to the multi-year platform direction—developer experience, delivery pipelines, and AI-augmented architecture review tooling (e.g., MCP servers, LLM-based rubric evaluation)—in partnership with platform engineering teams.

Qualifications

• Broad Infrastructure Architecture Experience: Proven track record of setting technical direction across large-scale systems many teams depend on—cloud, networking, data, or delivery.
• Multi-Cloud & Kubernetes Fluency: Production experience with GCP and/or AWS, paired with solid understanding of trade-offs.
• Infrastructure as Code: Strong proficiency in Terraform, GitOps workflows, and designing/reviewing reusable modules that other teams depend on.
• Depth in At Least One Domain (Nice to Have More):
• Cloud Infrastructure: Cloud-native networking (AWS transit patterns, GCP shared VPCs, Private Service Connect, VPC peering); Kubernetes/container orchestration (GKE or equivalent) and service mesh (Istio) and mTLS; designing for scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency; ensuring infrastructure and network security.
• Data Architecture: Messaging platforms (Kafka/Confluent, Pub/Sub); database technology fluency across SQL (PostgreSQL, Cloud SQL), NoSQL (MongoDB), columnar analytics (Snowflake, BigQuery), and search (Solr, Elasticsearch); pipeline design (Dataflow, Cloud Composer, MSK, Kinesis); open table formats (Apache Iceberg).
• Development & Operational Depth: Ability to dive into code to prove out patterns and evaluate system behavior under load (incidents, on-call impact, capacity, rollout blast radius).
• Influence & Leadership: Strong technical leadership, writing, and presentation skills.
• Technology Evaluation: Demonstrated ability to run rigorous technology evaluations—separating vendor pitch from architectural fit, running POCs, and producing actionable recommendations for engineering leaders.
• AI Infrastructure Fluency: Working knowledge of the infrastructure demands of AI/ML workloads (model serving, vector databases, inference cost and latency trade-offs).

Requirements

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience: 10-15+ years of cloud infrastructure, platform, DevOps, or data architecture experience.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits including holistic mind, body, and lifestyle programs designed for overall well-being.
• Actual compensation offered will be based on factors such as the candidate’s work location, qualifications, skills, experience, and/or training.
• US base salary for this position: $157,500 — $247,500 USD.