Cloud Architect

Overview

The Cloud Architect provides technical leadership for our hybrid, multi‑cloud estate—spanning on‑premises private cloud and public cloud platforms in Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. This role owns the reference architecture for infrastructure, drives platform automation and reliability, and partners with product, security, and operations teams to deliver secure, cost‑effective, and resilient infrastructure foundations.

The ideal location for this role is on‑site in Appleton, WI. Candidates in the Midwest may be considered based on the relevancy of experience, with some travel required to Appleton.

• Translate reference architectures into detailed designs and implementation plans for landing zones, networking, and IAM.
• Engineer scalable platforms with high availability and performance aligned to business SLOs and disaster‑recovery requirements.
• Create golden images and templates and secure baselines for repeatable deployment.
• Build robust Terraform modules; integrate validation, testing, and security scanning into pipelines.
• Implement Git Ops (Bitbucket pipelines) workflows where appropriate; improve release reliability and rollback safety.
• Guide teams on branching strategies and code review standards.
• Lead complex incident response, perform post‑incident reviews, and drive preventive engineering.
• Establish capacity‑planning and performance‑testing practices for critical services.
• Evolve runbooks to reduce MTTR and increase operational readiness.
• Implement Zero Trust principles; design RBAC models and service identities; integrate secrets management.
• Codify and enforce guardrails via policy‑as‑code; ensure auditability and remediation workflows.
• Collaborate on cost governance (tagging, budgets, alerts) and drive optimization initiatives.
• Mentor Engineering I and II teammates; conduct design and code reviews and provide constructive feedback.
• Partner with Security, Networking, Application, and Data teams; influence roadmaps and standards.
• Contribute to vendor/tool evaluations and present recommendations with trade‑offs.
• Live our values of High Performance, Caring Relationships, Strategic Foresight, and Entrepreneurial Spirit.
• Champion continuous improvement and quality control efforts to identify opportunities to innovate and improve efficiency, accuracy, and standardization.
• Continuously learn and develop professionally.
• Support corporate safety and government compliance, and perform other related duties as required.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field—or equivalent experience.
• Progressive IT experience with 7+ years focused on cloud architecture/engineering.
• Expertise in Terraform and/or Bicep; strong scripting (Power Shell or Python) and automation.
• Production experience with containers and Kubernetes (AKS/GKE).
• Observability design and Site‑Reliability Engineering practices; proven incident leadership and post‑mortem facilitation.
• CI/CD pipeline design (Azure Dev Ops/Git Hub Actions) with testing, security scanning, and policy gates.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, problem‑solving, and mentoring skills.
• Ability to participate in an on‑call rotation and support planned maintenance.

• Certifications:
  
  Azure Solutions Architect Expert or Azure Administrator + Azure Security Engineer;
  Google Professional Cloud Architect or Professional Dev Ops;
  Terraform Associate; CKA/CKAD.
• Experience with Packer, service mesh/Ingress, and secrets management at scale.
• Background applying policy‑as‑code (Azure Policy, Org Policy, OPA) and compliance frameworks;
  Fin Ops experience.

• Observability:
  Azure Monitor, GCP Cloud Monitoring/Logging, Elastic Stack.

U.S. Venture, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We ensure equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, marital status, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or other protected characteristics. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may call Human Resources at (920) 739‑6101.

U.S. Venture will not offer sponsorship for employment status. Accordingly, all applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full‑time basis and must not require U.S. Venture’s sponsorship to continue to work legally.