Cloud Architect - Azure

Job Title: Senior Azure Cloud Architect

Duration: 12-month contract-to-hire

Location: Remote

Required Pay Scale: $85–$90 per hour

Job Summary: Matlen Silver is seeking a Senior Azure Cloud Architect to support the modernization of a highly secure, mission-critical payments platform. This is a senior-level architecture and engineering position requiring deep Microsoft Azure expertise, strong technical leadership, and the ability to build cloud solutions directly when needed. The role is approximately 60% architecture and consulting and 40% hands-on engineering. The selected consultant will own end-to-end solution architecture, establish technical direction, and lead other architects and engineers while remaining actively involved in implementation.

The ideal candidate can independently design and build an enterprise Azure environment, translate business objectives into technical solutions, and communicate effectively with engineers, clients, and senior leadership.

• Lead the architecture and modernization of a complex, highly secure enterprise platform.
• Design scalable, resilient, secure, and highly available solutions in Microsoft Azure.
• Develop technology strategy and drive implementation of the architecture roadmap.
• Own the overall solution and ensure that application, infrastructure, security, networking, and deployment components work together effectively.
• Work with development and infrastructure teams to estimate work and establish delivery timelines.
• Translate business outcomes and client requirements into technical designs and implementation plans.
• Participate in application development, infrastructure engineering, security, deployment, and integration activities.
• Provide technical direction to architects, engineers, developers, and other project stakeholders.
• Present complex technical solutions to both executive and technical audiences.
• Build and configure Azure environments with limited guidance.
• Support modernization and migration from legacy platforms to Azure.

• 5–8+ years of experience performing architecture-level responsibilities in complex enterprise environments.
• At least 5 years of extensive, hands-on Microsoft Azure experience. Greater depth of experience is strongly preferred.
• Broad Azure platform expertise, including:
  • Identity and access management
  • Cloud security
  • Networking and connectivity
  • Azure Dev Ops
  • Azure SQL
  • Azure PaaS services
  • Monitoring, availability, performance, and resiliency
  • Governance and policy
• Demonstrated ability to design and build a complete Azure environment with minimal guidance.
• Strong hands-on Terraform experience for infrastructure as code.
• Experience creating reusable Terraform modules, deployment patterns, or enterprise infrastructure standards.
• Ability to balance architecture and consulting responsibilities with hands-on engineering and implementation.
• Experience owning end-to-end cloud solutions across application, infrastructure, security, networking, and deployment layers.
• Strong technical leadership with experience guiding architects and engineers.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex solutions to senior leadership, clients, architects, developers, and infrastructure teams.
• Experience translating business requirements into cloud architecture and technical implementation plans.
• 10+ years of combined development, infrastructure, cloud, or enterprise technology experience.
• Ability to participate in highly technical interviews and explain design decisions in detail.

• Experience leading a legacy or mainframe modernization to Microsoft Azure.
• Experience implementing Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework, or CAF, and enterprise-scale landing-zone concepts.
• Cloud architecture experience in highly regulated,…