Cloud Platform Architect

Are you looking for an exciting job where you can put your skills and talents to work at a company you can feel proud to be a part of? Do you want a workplace that will challenge you and offer you opportunities to learn and grow? A position at Xcel Energy could be just what you’re looking for.

Xcel Energy is transforming its technology landscape to support reliable, secure, and sustainable energy delivery. The Cloud Platform Architect plays a critical role in this transformation by designing and governing the enterprise cloud foundation that supports applications, analytics, and grid‑adjacent systems. This role focuses on the cloud platform itself—not individual applications—ensuring that cloud services are secure, reliable, reusable, observable, and supportable across hybrid and multi‑cloud environments.

The position will provide design and thought leadership in GCP, AWS, and Azure. As a Cloud Platform Architect, you will:
Design, build, and govern enterprise cloud foundations on GCP, AWS, and Azure – serving as a thought leader in projects, networking, identity, security, and shared services. Establish cloud standards, patterns, and guardrails that enable teams to deliver solutions quickly and safely. Ensure cloud platforms align with Xcel Energy’s Architecture Tenets, including security, observability, reusability, and supportability. Enable workloads to run consistently across cloud, on‑premises, and edge environments.

Partner with security, infrastructure, operations, and delivery teams to ensure platforms are compliant, resilient, and operationally ready. Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and architectural guidance across the organization.

• Cloud Platform & Architecture Design enterprise cloud “landing zones” with built‑in security, governance, and automation.
• Define standards for networking, identity and access management, logging, monitoring, and platform services.
• Support container based and cloud‑native hosting models, with flexibility for legacy and packaged solutions.
• Security & Compliance Embed security into cloud platforms from the start using Zero Trust principles.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory and enterprise security requirements.
• Partner with security teams to implement approved controls and services.
• Automation & Standardization Promote Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD based provisioning.
• Reduce manual configuration and improve consistency through automation.
• Create reusable cloud templates, modules, and patterns.
• Reliability, Observability & Supportability Design platforms for high availability, resiliency, and disaster recovery.
• Ensure monitoring, logging, and alerting are built into all platform components.
• Design platforms that can be effectively operated, supported, and maintained over time.
• Collaboration & Leadership Work closely with architects, engineers, and business partners across IT and operational teams.
• Participate in architecture reviews and governance forums.
• Mentor and guide teams on cloud best practices and platform usage.

• Bachelor's degree in Technology, Science, Business or related field, or 4 years of experience equivalent to the position.
• Seven years of related functional experience.
• Exposure to diverse systems, technologies and processing environments in a large Corporate setting.
• Project solution architecture experience.
• Knowledge of core aspects of architecture (Software, Hardware, Network, Integration, Data, hosting models, platform types, etc.)
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Extensive knowledge of future technology trends within area of expertise.
• Excellent communication skills, effective with varying organizational levels and skill sets.
• Excellent Relationship Management and collaboration skills, with a track record of working as one team cross‑organizationally to drive innovation and business results.

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or enterprise architecture roles.
• 5+ years of hands‑on experience with public cloud platforms.
• Strong experience with Google Cloud Platform, including:
  Identity and access management, networking…