Principal Cloud Architect

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential technology organization seeking a Principal Cloud Architect to join their distributed team. This is a fully remote position open to candidates worldwide.

In this role, you'll serve as a technical leader shaping cloud and data platform architecture across a large-scale engineering organization. You'll design platform patterns, build reference implementations, guide technology evaluations, and enable R&D teams through architecture review and hands-on enablement.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end platform patterns, build reference implementations, and partner with implementation teams to roll them out across the organization
• Participate in weekly architecture reviews using documented rubrics, expanding standards libraries and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)
• Provide architectural stewardship in either Cloud Infrastructure (runtime, networking, service mesh, container platforms, scalability, resilience, security) or Data Architecture (event streaming, database technology strategy, pipeline patterns, warehouse and lakehouse strategies)
• Evaluate emerging technologies through structured POCs, drive standards for technology lifecycle management, and lead vendor evaluation and consolidation initiatives
• Partner with FinOps on cost optimization, including AI/ML infrastructure spend and evaluation of open-weight models versus hosted API alternatives
• Host design reviews and workshops, serving as technical consultant to engineering teams making complex infrastructure choices
• Contribute to multi-year platform direction including developer experience, delivery pipelines, and AI-augmented architecture review tooling

What We're Looking For

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10-15+ years of cloud infrastructure, platform, DevOps, or data architecture experience
• Proven track record setting technical direction across large-scale systems with production experience on GCP and/or AWS
• Practical experience with Kubernetes (GKE or equivalent) as runtime foundation for modern workloads
• Strong proficiency in Terraform, GitOps workflows, and designing reusable infrastructure-as-code modules
• Depth in at least one domain: Cloud Infrastructure (networking, container orchestration, service mesh, mTLS, scalability, security) or Data Architecture (Kafka/messaging platforms, SQL/NoSQL databases, columnar analytics, pipeline design, open table formats)
• Ability to dive into code, build working prototypes, and evaluate system behavior under production load
• Strong technical leadership, writing, and presentation skills with track record driving standards adoption without formal authority
• Demonstrated ability running rigorous technology evaluations and producing actionable recommendations
• Working knowledge of AI/ML infrastructure demands including model serving, vector databases, and inference cost trade-offs

Bonus Qualifications:

• Depth in both cloud infrastructure and data infrastructure domains
• Experience with GCP organization-level policies, folder structure, and IAM inheritance design
• Confluent Platform knowledge beyond core Kafka (Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB)
• Experience running or participating in Architecture Review Council or equivalent governance body
• Hands-on experience with AI-augmented architecture review workflows or MCP servers
• MLOps tooling experience (MLflow, Kubeflow, Vertex AI Pipelines, SageMaker)

How We Work With You

Get A Job.ai represents exceptional talent to leading technology organizations. When you apply through our platform:

• Our recruiting team will screen your application and conduct an initial conversation about your background and career goals
• If there's a strong match, we'll submit your profile to our client for consideration
• We'll guide you through the interview process and provide feedback at each stage
• Please do not contact the client directly—all communication should flow through Get A Job.ai to ensure the best candidate experience

Pay

This information will be discussed during the screening process with our recruiting team.

Equal Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to equal employment opportunity. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.