Senior Cloud Architect

Position Summary

Effectual Senior Cloud Architects are responsible for technical leadership of Professional Services projects. They partner with Engagement Managers (EMs) to deliver an exceptional customer and delivery team experience. Effectual Cloud Architects are “Brand Ambassadors” and are expected to demonstrate Effectual’s experience and expertise through the delivery of high-quality, leading-practice solutions to customers. Aligning business technology with an organization’s strategy and goals can often be a complex and overwhelming process without the right tools and expertise.

A Glimpse into the Daily Routine of a Senior Cloud Architect

Effectual is seeking a Senior Cloud Architect to lead complex enterprise cloud architecture engagements for strategic clients. As a senior technical expert and trusted advisor, you’ll define architecture strategy, govern technical standards, and mentor both client teams and internal architects across modernization, resilience, security, and optimization initiatives.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Lead Enterprise Architecture Programs

• Define enterprise target-state cloud architecture and phased roadmap strategies
• Lead architecture review boards and executive design discussions with client leadership
• Establish reusable architecture standards, guardrails, and delivery patterns across programs

Design Cloud Infrastructure

• Architect scalable, highly available AWS solutions using Well-Architected Framework principles
• Build multi-account landing zones, hybrid connectivity (Direct Connect, Transit Gateway), and DR/BC architectures
• Architect solutions across containers, storage, networking, data platforms, and serverless computing

Automate & Optimize

• Develop Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform and CloudFormation
• Create Python automation scripts and CI/CD pipelines
• Optimize cloud performance, cost efficiency, reliability, and security posture

Enable Client Success

• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to client engineering teams
• Lead workshops, knowledge transfer sessions, and incident response
• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure challenges and create comprehensive documentation

Qualifications

• 10+ years of continual, prior experience working as a Solution Architect, including in parallel:
  • 6+ years architecting and building AWS infrastructure
  • 2+ years of infrastructure as code experience (Terraform preferred)
  • 2+ years of DevOps toolchain experience (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, AWS Code* Suite)
• AWS experience within the past year, with knowledge of primary AWS services (Compute, Storage, Networking, RDS)
• Strong track record of implementing AWS services in a variety of distributed computing environments
• Experience facilitating discussions with senior leadership regarding technical/architectural trade-offs, best practices, and risk mitigation
• Experience leading highly available and fault-tolerant enterprise and web-scale software deployments
• Experience managing data center or cloud operations, including data assurance, monitoring, alerting, and notifications
• Demonstrated ability to think strategically about business, product, and technical challenges
• Strong working knowledge of leading AWS cloud security practices
• Proficient in developing Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform, AWS CloudFormation)
• Proficient in coding configuration management tooling (e.g., Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
• Proficient in at least one or more programming/scripting languages (e.g., Python, Java, Node)
• Demonstrable knowledge of Agile and Waterfall SDLC methodologies