Cloud Architect

Role overview

Responsibilities

• Develop cloud strategy, adoption approaches, target states, landing zones, reference architectures, principles, patterns, guardrails, and technical standards.
• Design public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments; assess workloads for suitability, migration approach, and modernization opportunities.
• Define applicable migration approaches, including rehost, replatform, refactor, replace, retire, and retain.
• Design cloud networking, connectivity, identity, access management, security, logging, monitoring, and operational architecture.
• Define architecture for cloud-native services, containers, Kubernetes, serverless, managed services, and platform services; support modernization initiatives.
• Set resilience, availability, backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, performance, cybersecurity, privacy, regulatory, and compliance requirements.
• Support cloud governance, account structures, resource organization, policy enforcement, tagging, cost optimization, and FinOps.
• Collaborate across architecture and technology teams; conduct reviews, assess solutions, support platform selection, vendor evaluation, and proof-of-concept activities.
• Identify cloud architecture risks, dependencies, constraints, and mitigations.

Required experience

• Minimum 8–10 years in infrastructure, cloud engineering, systems engineering, solution architecture, or related technology disciplines.
• At least 4–5 years of hands-on Cloud Architecture or comparable senior cloud design experience.
• Demonstrated experience designing enterprise-scale cloud and hybrid-cloud environments.
• Experience with cloud migration, modernization, landing zones, governance, security, networking, and identity architecture.
• Experience supporting large-scale cloud or digital transformation programs and working with technology teams, cybersecurity teams, vendors, and senior stakeholders.

Frameworks and tools

• Preferred frameworks include TOGAF, ArchiMate, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud well-architected frameworks, cloud adoption frameworks, Zero Trust, DevOps, DevSecOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code principles.
• Preferred exposure includes Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, and enterprise architecture tools.

Preferred qualifications

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related discipline is preferred.
• A professional-level cloud architecture certification is highly desirable; TOGAF certification is desirable, and relevant cloud security, Kubernetes, DevOps, or infrastructure certifications are advantageous.

Personal attributes