Principal Cloud Architect

Principal Cloud Architect

Symbotic is seeking a Principal Cloud Architect to join our Platform Engineering team within our Information Technology organization. Your job will be to define and drive Symbotic's cloud architecture strategy on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), establish cloud-native platform standards, and provide technical leadership for the next generation of scalable, secure, and AI-enabled engineering platforms.

This is a ground-floor opportunity on a newly formed team. We are in the early stages of a major cloud build-out: migrating more than one hundred environments — thousands of VMs — to the cloud while architecting greenfield platforms that must provision hundreds to thousands of instances on demand and handle petabyte-scale data generated daily by our robotics systems. You will design the self-service platform model that lets a small team support this scale: engineering teams get resource pools they configure and manage end to end, while Platform Engineering owns the guardrails, validation, and visibility that keep the platform stable, secure, and cost-efficient.

This is a hands-on, player-coach role — not a whiteboard-only position. You will set enterprise architecture direction and governance, but you will also prototype solutions, review designs, and work side-by-side with engineers to land the platforms you architect. You will partner with engineering, infrastructure, security, DevOps, AI, and product teams across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments where our robots run.

The Platform Engineering team is part of the Information Technology organization and is responsible for building and operating the foundational technology platforms that enable software development, cloud infrastructure, automation, observability, developer productivity, and enterprise engineering services across Symbotic.

Our team delivers the shared cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes infrastructure, developer tools, data services, and operational capabilities that power both enterprise applications and next-generation robotics solutions. We are a nimble, newly bootstrapped team — which means outsized ownership, direct executive visibility, and the chance to define the platform architecture from the ground up.

What you'll do:

• Define and govern enterprise cloud architecture and cloud-native platform standards on GCP, and own the multi-year cloud platform roadmap.
• Architect for hyperscale growth: design provisioning, networking, and data architectures that scale rapidly and elastically to hundreds or thousands of instances and petabyte-scale daily data volumes.
• Lead large-scale cloud migration and modernization, moving 100+ existing environments to GCP alongside greenfield, Kubernetes-based (GKE) platform initiatives from strategy through production adoption.
• Build a true self-service platform, not a ticket-driven service: developer self-service, golden paths, resource-pool provisioning with guardrails, and the validation and merge-visibility controls that protect platform stability.
• Partner with the Security team to establish workload isolation across cloud resource hierarchies, secure disaster recovery, and snapshot/backup capabilities that ensure rapid recovery.
• Own cloud cost optimization and FinOps: design for efficiency so the platform delivers maximum capability within a disciplined budget.
• Champion AI-powered engineering — from AI-assisted development to intelligent, automated operations — so a small team can do more with less.
• Drive Platform Engineering capabilities including CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code that measurably improve developer velocity.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers and architects, run architecture review forums, and influence enterprise technology strategy with executive leadership.

What you'll need:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Minimum of 12 years designing and implementing enterprise and cloud architectures, including at least one large-scale cloud migration or platform modernization you personally led.
• Minimum of 5 years in a Principal Architect, Lead Architect, or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
• Deep expertise with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) including GKE, GCP resource hierarchy and IAM, VPC design, and data services — or demonstrated depth on AWS/Azure with clear ability to lead on GCP.
• Proven experience operating at high scale: rapid, automated provisioning of large fleets and architectures handling very large data volumes and traffic.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes, containers, microservices, distributed systems, and APIs.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred) and GitOps-driven delivery.
• Experience building self-service Platform Engineering, CI/CD, and DevOps solutions adopted by multiple engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of cloud security and isolation models, identity, networking, observability, disaster recovery, and backup/snapshot strategies.
• Cloud cost management / FinOps experience at enterprise scale.
• Exceptional communication, executive influence, and architecture governance experience and able to explain complex architecture decisions to executives and win alignment across engineering organizations.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience architecting hybrid cloud / edge platforms that connect on-premises, industrial, or robotics environments to the cloud (e.g., Google Distributed Cloud / Anthos).
• Experience in robotics, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, or other physical-world automation industries.
• Experience with AI/ML platforms, GenAI developer tooling, or data platform architecture at petabyte scale.
• Experience standing up platform capabilities on a small or newly formed team.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., Google Professional Cloud Architect, CKA/CKS) or architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF).

Our Environment:

• Hybrid, based out of our Wilmington, MA headquarters, with flexibility based on candidate location and qualifications.
• Travel of up to 25% may be required, primarily to our Wilmington, MA engineering headquarters and occasionally to engineering or customer locations; a valid driver's license is required.