OverviewServes as the senior technical visionary and enterprise leader responsible for designing and building a modern, scalable cloud architecture at Dartmouth Health. This role drives the organization's new cloud-native build while strategically migrating and integrating with the existing legacy on-premises and hybrid environment. The Senior Cloud Architect owns the end-to-end cloud strategy across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, ensures HIPAA-compliant, resilient, and cost-optimized solutions, mentors technical teams, and aligns cloud capabilities with clinical, research, and business priorities in a complex healthcare setting.
Responsibilities
Define, evolve, and communicate the enterprise cloud strategy and target architecture, with a strong emphasis on cloud-native and hybrid/multi-cloud designs that accelerate the new cloud build while enabling secure, low-disruption migration from legacy systems
Lead the architecture, design, deployment, and modernization of complex solutions across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS; select and integrate appropriate cloud services while addressing constraints from legacy environments, regulatory requirements, and mission-critical healthcare workloads. Establishes, governs, documents, communicates, and enforces cloud infrastructure standards, design principles, and best practices, ensuring consistency across environments and teams.
Own the development and enforcement of cloud technology standards, reference architectures, guardrails, and best practices (including Infrastructure as Code and policy-as-code); chair the Architecture Review Board and drive governance for both new cloud builds and legacy integration points.
Provide expert architectural consulting, direction, and hands-on mentorship to systems analysts, cloud engineers, other architects, and cross-functional teams; promote a DevSecOps culture, automation, and continuous improvement.
Maintain deep knowledge of the current IT landscape — including legacy infrastructure, interdependencies, and technology portfolio — while designing pathways to modern cloud architectures that deliver greater agility, scalability, and innovation.
Develop, manage, and optimize the cloud infrastructure capacity plan, performance, observability, and disaster recovery strategies that support both greenfield cloud builds and hybrid legacy modernization.
Conduct ongoing research on emerging technologies (serverless, container orchestration, event-driven architectures, AI/ML integration, edge computing); develop proofs-of-concept and recommend adoptions that enhance cost-effectiveness (via FinOps), flexibility, resilience, and clinical outcomes.
Lead multi-year cloud investment roadmaps and FinOps initiatives, including detailed cost-benefit analyses, rightsizing, and opportunities for significant cost reduction while modernizing legacy workloads.
Design, develop, and oversee implementation of secure, end-to-end cloud-native integrated systems (microservices, containers, serverless, API-first) that coexist with and gradually replace legacy components.
Develop and execute comprehensive test, validation, and monitoring plans to ensure performance, security, and compliance of both new cloud architectures and hybrid integrations; report findings and drive iterative improvements.
Ensure all architectures incorporate Zero Trust security, robust IAM, encryption, threat modeling, and full HIPAA/HITECH compliance, with special attention to protecting sensitive data during legacy-to-cloud transitions.
Collaborate with leadership, security, compliance, clinical, and research stakeholders to translate complex requirements into actionable architectures and influence technology decisions that support Dartmouth Health’s digital transformation.
Promote knowledge sharing through high-quality architecture documentation, standards, training, and thought leadership; act as the go-to expert for cloud modernization challenges involving legacy systems.
Performs other duties as required or assigned
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, computer engineering, systems analysis, or a related field (Master’s degree preferred); or equivalent combination of education and extensive professional experience.
- 12+ years of progressive experience in IT architecture, with at least 5–7 years in senior or principal cloud roles focused on large-scale, regulated environments (healthcare strongly preferred).
- Deep hands-on expertise designing modern cloud-native architectures — including microservices, containers, serverless computing, event-driven systems, and API gateways — alongside proven success modernizing legacy environments through hybrid connectivity, refactoring, and phased migrations.
- Extensive experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, etc.), CI/CD pipelines, and DevSecOps practices.
- Strong understanding of multi-tier and large-scale distributed systems, relational/NoSQL databases, modern messaging/event services, loose coupling, stateless design, consistency models, CDN, and observability tools.
- Hands-on proficiency with cloud and traditional networking (VPCs, private links, service meshes, load balancing, firewalls, DNS, hybrid connectivity) building on foundational LAN/WAN and OSI knowledge.
- Comprehensive cloud security and compliance experience, including Zero Trust, IAM (OAuth/SAML/OIDC), encryption/key management, certificate-based authentication, and healthcare-specific frameworks (HIPAA, HITECH).
- Demonstrated success with FinOps-driven cost optimization, system performance tuning, capacity planning, and healthcare data considerations (e.g., interoperability, secure data lakes/warehouses).
- Experience leading cloud migrations and integrations that minimize risk to legacy clinical systems while delivering measurable improvements in scalability, resilience, and innovation.
- Ability to exercise independent judgment and take decisive action on complex, enterprise-level issues involving both new cloud builds and legacy constraints.
- Exceptional analytical, creative problem-solving, and strategic thinking skills.
- Outstanding listening, interpersonal, written, and oral communication skills; able to translate between technical depth and executive/business language.
- Logical, efficient, and highly detail-oriented with strong attention to quality and risk management.
- Highly self-motivated, directed, and able to thrive while prioritizing and executing under pressure in a dynamic healthcare environment.
- Strong customer service orientation and a collaborative, team-oriented mindset; proven ability to mentor and influence without direct authority.
Required Licensure/Certifications
