About the Role The Principal AWS Cloud Architect is a lead-level technical role on our cloud engagements. You'll own the technical direction of a workstream or engagement end to end, working with the customer's technical teams to set strategy and drive it to a documented, agreed target state.
This is a leadership role that stays hands-on. You'll lead and mentor a blended onshore/offshore delivery team. When the project calls for it, you'll roll up your sleeves and build: designing landing zones, running migration waves, and writing and reviewing IaC yourself. You're equally comfortable leading a team of engineers or working independently as the sole architect on a project.
Key ResponsibilitiesTechnical Leadership & Strategy
- Own the technical strategy for the engagement and drive it to a documented, agreed target state.
- Act as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's technical leadership on architecture, sequencing, and risk; drive discussions to decisions rather than leaving them open.
- Recommend best-fit approaches prescriptively and with conviction, backed by delivery experience. Say so clearly when the customer's preferred path is the wrong one.
- Make and document consequential architecture decisions, including trade-offs considered and those deliberately deferred.
- Set the engineering standard by example: review designs, code, and IaC personally.
Hands-On Delivery
- Work independently as the sole architect on smaller or early-phase engagements, owning design and build without a supporting team.
- Step in hands-on when the project needs it to:
- build foundational environments
- execute migration waves
- troubleshoot replication and cutover issues
- write Terraform/CDK
- Lead remediation personally when a workstream needs stabilization.
Team Leadership & Offshore Coordination
- Lead and coordinate offshore engineering teams across time zones: assign and sequence work, set clear acceptance criteria, and run effective handoffs so progress continues around the clock.
- Review offshore deliverables (designs, IaC, runbooks, migration plans) for quality and consistency before they reach the customer.
- Mentor consultants and engineers to raise their technical depth, delivery discipline, and customer-facing skill. Unblock them quickly and help them grow into more senior roles.
- Partner with the Engagement Manager and customer to build an achievable project plan with realistic milestones and dependencies.
- Confirm the team has the right skill mix and capacity; escalate gaps early.
- Coordinate technical execution alongside partner consultants and other vendor teams in an Agile delivery model.
- Contribute to the development and refinement of new delivery offerings, reusable assets, and best practices.
Foundational Architecture
- Design and deploy AWS foundational environments using Control Tower and Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA).
- Define and implement multi-account strategy, covering:
- AWS Organizations and OU structure
- account vending
- SCPs
- centralized logging and security tooling
- Implement IAM and Identity Center, guardrails, and security baselines across the account structure.
Migration Execution
- Lead discovery and assessment of on-premises estates: application dependency mapping, right-sizing analysis, and migration wave planning.
- Determine the right migration strategy per workload (rehost or replatform), balancing speed, risk, and long-term operating cost.
- Lead lift-and-shift replication of physical and VMware-based servers into EC2 using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), including image conversion and OS/driver remediation.
- Direct replatforming onto managed AWS services: self-managed databases to RDS, load balancers to ALB/NLB, static content to CloudFront.
- Own hybrid connectivity design: Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, Transit Gateway, DNS, and Active Directory integration.
- Oversee storage and database migrations (DMS, DataSync, Storage Gateway, Snow Family) and validate data integrity.
- Set standards for IaC (Terraform, AWS CDK), pipeline automation, and operational readiness before workloads reach production.
- Produce and review design documents, migration runbooks, diagrams, decision records, and hand-over guides.
Qualifications- 15+ years designing and operating infrastructure, including 5+ years in a lead or principal architect role on customer-facing engagements.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or similar.
- Demonstrated hands-on AWS depth. You have personally built production systems, not only managed teams that built them, and can still do so today.
- Proven ability to work independently as the sole architect on a project, from design through delivery.
- Experience leading and mentoring offshore or distributed engineering teams, including delegating work, reviewing quality, and coordinating across time zones.
- Experience setting technical strategy for an engagement and coordinating with customer technical leadership.
- Hands-on experience building AWS foundational environments: Control Tower, Landing Zone Accelerator, AWS Organizations, and multi-account architecture.
- Demonstrated experience with large-scale, multi-wave cloud migrations.
- Practical experience executing rehost and replatform migrations, and the judgment to recommend the right approach per workload.
- Hands-on experience with AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), AWS Migration Hub, and VM Import/Export.
- Strong AWS networking fundamentals: VPC design, routing, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect/VPN, and DNS.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and AWS CDK) and at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or PowerShell).
- Current ability to review code and IaC, not just architecture diagrams.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present to both customer executives and engineering teams.
- Active AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional certification required. An additional AWS Specialty certification (e.g., Security, Advanced Networking, or Machine Learning) is a plus.
- Experience with AWS Transform (including AWS Transform for VMware) is a significant plus.
