Principal AWS Cloud Architect

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 Responsibilities

Technical 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; escalates 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 Cloud Front.

• Own hybrid connectivity design:
  Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN,…