Cloud Architect

Cloud Architect
Role Overview
The Cloud Architect owns the technical leadership of professional services engagements, working hand in hand with Engagement Managers to deliver a strong experience for both the client and the delivery team. The role represents the firm's depth of expertise, translating it into high-quality, leading-practice solutions for customers.
A Day in the Life
Architects lead delivery teams. Depending on the day, you might:

• Map out and document an AWS system that fits a customer's specific needs and constraints.
• Sit down with a customer or colleague to diagnose an issue, share knowledge, and clear a path forward.
• Team up with an Engagement Manager to shape how something gets communicated to the client.
• Pull together requirements, capture the current state, and walk the customer through your proposed approach.
• Hop on a pre-sales conversation to show a prospect the kind of expertise they'd be buying.

Key Responsibilities

Drive Technical Excellence

• Push leading-practice architecture into every assigned client engagement.
• Architect and stand up AWS solutions - landing zones, container platforms, hosting environments, data storage - drawing on services like Control Tower, EKS/ECS, S3, Transit Gateway, and EC2.
• Run cost-benefit and risk-reward analysis to inform decisions.
• Client out solution designs, build-and-deploy plans, and the high-level validation steps the delivery team will execute.
• Carry accountability for the technical success of client projects overall.
• Work with technology leadership to sharpen delivery processes and lift technical efficacy over time.
• Help sequence and prioritize infrastructure work, break down the scope, clear roadblocks, and settle solution-design disagreements collaboratively.

Build Knowledge and Collaboration

• Coach team members on leading practices.
• Walk clients through the why behind a solution and the practices that support it.
• Bring technical stakeholders to consensus.

Anchor Project Governance and Execution

• Touch base with the team daily to track progress.
• Press the team on their technical approaches and hold them to delivering on them.
• Log time against assigned projects each day.

Support the Delivery Team

• Keep your work visible and operate openly.
• Respond promptly when teammates need information.
• Share how you work best and learn the same about others to build a team that runs with respect and efficiency.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of continuous experience as a Solution Architect, including in parallel:
  • 3+ years architecting AWS infrastructure
  • 3+ years building AWS infrastructure, to include:
    • 1+ year of infrastructure-as-code work (Terraform preferred)
    • 1+ year on a DevOps toolchain (GitHub, GitLab, AWS Code* Suite, etc.)
• At least one AWS Professional-level certification.
• Solid command of current AWS cloud security practices.
• Skilled in IaC development (Terraform, AWS CloudFormation).
• Comfortable scripting configuration management with tools like Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
• Working proficiency in one or more programming/scripting languages (Python, Java, Node, etc.).
• Familiar with both Agile and Waterfall delivery models.
• Able to run multiple client engagements in parallel.
• Detail-oriented.
• Strong communicator with disciplined time management.

Nice-to-Have Skills and Experience

• Container development.
• Container orchestration on platforms such as Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS EKS.
• Additional AWS certifications (Developer Associate, SysOps Administrator Associate, Solutions Architect Associate, etc.).
• Wiring static and dynamic code-analysis tools into CI/CD pipelines.
• Use of code-analysis and observability tools such as AWS X-Ray, AppDynamics, or Dynatrace.
• Prior management experience is a plus, though this is an individual-contributor role.
• Comfortable working an Eastern Time schedule while supporting customers in other regions.