OverviewAdastra Canada is looking for a senior technologist to be the firm's AWS champion inside the Presales team. This is a customer-facing role for someone who has spent years building on AWS, has real delivery experience across the AWS data and analytics stack, and can walk into a discovery session with a prospective client's data leadership and leave with a credible, costed solution on the table.
The role owns the technical quality of every AWS-centered pursuit we run, and it is equally the technical face of our relationship with AWS — supporting co-sell, maintaining our Partner Network standing and competencies, and raising the firm's profile in the Canadian AWS community.
Primary Location: Toronto, ON
Work Model: Hybrid 3-Days Onsite
Employment Type: Permanent Full-Time
Vacancy Status: New
Compensation Range: $120,000 to 170,000 plus bonus
RESPONSIBILITIES
Presales Solution Leadership on AWS
- Act as the lead technical voice on AWS opportunities from qualification through to signature, working alongside sales, alliances, and delivery leadership.
- Run discovery and requirements workshops with client architects, data leaders, and business stakeholders, then translate what you hear into a defensible target architecture.
- Design AWS solutions end to end — landing zones and Control Tower, VPC and identity patterns, data platform services, integration, security, and governance — and defend the design under client and third-party scrutiny.
- Produce cost models and sizing estimates that hold up after the deal closes, including Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and other commitment options.
- Own the technical response of RFP, RFI, and proposal responses, and lead demonstrations, technical deep dives, and proofs of concept.
- Apply the AWS Well-Architected Framework in pursuit work, including running Well-Architected reviews and migration readiness assessments for clients.
AWS Data, Analytics and AI Platform
- Serve as the firm's reference point on the AWS data stack — Redshift, S3-based lakehouse patterns with Glue and Lake Formation, Athena, EMR, Kinesis and MSK, and Amazon DataZone — including where each service is the right answer and where it is not.
- Advise clients on migration and modernization paths from on-premises warehouses, Oracle and SQL Server estates, and legacy Hadoop platforms onto AWS, including Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, and Databricks on AWS.
- Position data governance, cataloguing, and quality across the AWS estate, and design capacity, workload isolation, and cost-management models that keep analytics spend predictable.
- Act as the presales authority on applied AI: Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Amazon Q, retrieval-augmented generation and agentic patterns.
- Keep the firm's AI point of view current as the AWS platform changes, and feed what you learn back into offerings, pricing, and delivery methodology.
AWS Alliance and Partner Relationship Development
- Work with the alliances team as the technical counterpart to AWS partner development managers, specialist solutions architects, and account teams across Canada.
- Drive co-sell motions: qualify joint opportunities, prepare the technical material AWS sellers need, register and progress deals through APN and AWS Marketplace, and pursue funding programs such as MAP and POA.
- Represent Adastra in AWS partner forums, technical briefings, and immersion days, and channel AWS incentives and assessment funding into client engagements.
QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS & EXPERIENCE
- Eight or more years in data, analytics, or cloud consulting, including at least four in a customer-facing presales, solution architecture, or technical sales role.
- Deep hands-on AWS experience across IAM, VPC networking, storage, compute, security, and governance, with the ability to design and cost a multi-account landing zone without help.
- Strong command of the AWS data estate: Redshift, Glue and Lake Formation, Athena, EMR, streaming services, and Aurora or RDS, backed by delivery experience rather than product briefings.
- Demonstrated experience designing and positioning AI solutions on AWS, including generative AI patterns on Bedrock or SageMaker and the guardrails that make them acceptable to enterprise risk teams.
- A track record of leading the technical side of competitive pursuits, from qualification through proposal.
- Exceptional communication skills, with the range to move from a CIO conversation about business outcomes to a whiteboard session with engineers.
- Eligibility to work in Canada and willingness to travel occasionally within North America for client meetings and AWS events.
- A collaborative working style across the firm: able to partner with the delivery practices to pull the right expertise into pursuit, and to work with sales, alliances, and executive leadership on qualification, pricing, and go-to-market decisions.
NICE TO HAVE
- Prior experience inside an AWS partner or at AWS itself, with working knowledge of co-sell, the APN partner program, and AWS Marketplace.
- Industry depth in financial services, insurance, retail, healthcare, or the public sector.
- Working familiarity with competing platforms such as Azure, Google Cloud, Snowflake, or Microsoft Fabric, and the ability to argue the trade-offs fairly.
- AWS certifications such as Solutions Architect 6 Professional, Data Engineer 6 Associate.
