Platform Architect/Cloud Architect

Job Description

Platform Architect/Cloud Architect

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Salary: Open + bonus

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Location: Chicago, IL

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Hybrid: 3 days onsite, 2 days remote

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*We are unable to provide sponsorship for this role*

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Qualifications

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• 10+ years of experience
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• Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes — Kubernetes tenants, observability, solution design, operators, cluster architecture, workload design, networking, security, and operational patterns at scale
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• Kubernetes on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.)
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• OPA (Open Policy Agent)
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• CI/CD pipelines: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or equivalent
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• Practical experience with Apache Flink or equivalent stream processing frameworks — job design, state management, and deployment on Kubernetes
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• Experience designing and implementing GitOps pipelines —platform governance, infrastructure-as-code, environment promotion, secrets management, and release automation using tools such as Flux, ArgoCD, Terraform, or Helm
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Preferred, not required

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• Hands-on experience architecting Apache Kafka deployments
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• Strong AWS architecture experience — VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, networking, and security services
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• Experience with observability tooling at scale — OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
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Responsibilities

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• Lead architecture design and decision-making for core platform capabilities: container orchestration, streaming infrastructure, cloud architecture, CI/CD and
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• GitOps pipelines, and observability
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• Develop and maintain target-state platform architectures with clear transition plans from current state
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• Own reference architectures for Kubernetes-based workloads, Kafka streaming topologies, Flink stream processing, and AWS infrastructure patterns
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• Architect and guide migration of workloads to cloud-native patterns on AWS, including compute, networking, storage, and security services
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• Define GitOps model — infrastructure-as-code practices, pipeline standards, environment promotion, and configuration management at scale
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• Evaluate and recommend platform technologies and tooling; lead proof-of-concept efforts to validate architectural decisions before commitment
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• Establish observability standards — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting — as a platform-level capability, not an afterthought
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• Partner with Application Architecture to ensure platform capabilities match application design requirements — particularly for high-throughput, low-latency clearing workloads
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• Collaborate with Engineering and operations teams to ensure platform designs are buildable, operable, and supportable — not just theoretically sound
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• Facilitate architecture working sessions with technical leads and business stakeholders; communicate platform decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
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