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; escalate 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 CloudFront.

Own hybrid connectivity design: Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, Transit Gateway, DNS, and Active Directory integration.

Oversee storage and database migrations (DMS, DataSync, Storage Gateway, Snow Family) and validate data integrity.

Set standards for IaC (Terraform, AWS CDK), pipeline automation, and operational readiness before workloads reach production.