About this role
Cloud Architecture Strategy & Standards
• Define cloud reference architectures, design principles, and guardrails for AWS and Azure.
• Develop target-state architectures across networking, compute, data, identity, and platform services.
• Establish reusable architectural patterns and design standards for consistent adoption across teams.
Solution Design & Governance
• Provide oversight and governance to ensure solutions adhere to security, resilience, cost, and operational requirements.
• Conduct architectural reviews, support compliance with cloud guardrails, and ensure alignment with enterprise-wide patterns.
• Guide product teams on architectural trade-offs, future-state planning, and selection of platform components.
Technical Leadership Across Teams & Vendors
• Lead architectural direction for high-impact cloud initiatives, multi-team platforms, and strategic product builds.
• Provide guidance to internal teams and external vendors to ensure architectural consistency and quality.
• Collaborate with cloud engineers, DevOps engineers, security teams, and product owners to shape end-to-end solution design.
Security, Resilience & Operational Excellence
• Embed cloud security best practices (IAM, identity federation, encryption, network segmentation, least privilege).
• Ensure resilience through multi-AZ/region patterns, automated recovery, failover strategies, and design for high availability.
• Contribute to operational readiness through logging, monitoring, cost controls, and lifecycle management of cloud components.
Cost Management & Optimization
• Define cost-optimised architecture patterns and guide teams on capacity planning, rightsizing, and cloud economics.
• Partner with FinOps/operations teams to improve visibility into consumption and total cost of ownership (TCO).
Architecture Enablement & Knowledge Sharing
• Provide architectural coaching and guidance to engineers, promoting cloud fluency across teams.
• Maintain architecture documentation, reusable reference designs, and platform guidelines.
• Contribute to developing ERM’s cloud operating model and long-term architecture roadmap.
Influence And Decision-Making Authority
• Sets architectural direction for cloud platforms, shared services, and multi-team product ecosystems.
• Influences enterprise-level decisions regarding cloud technology choices, patterns, and target-state evolution.
• Drives decisions on security, performance, resilience, and cost trade-offs across solutions.
• Shapes standards and governance processes adopted across delivery teams and vendors.
Job Requirements & Capabilities
Education & Experience
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience designing and delivering complex enterprise-grade solutions on cloud platforms.
• Deep hands-on architectural exposure across AWS and Azure, including multi-account/subscription architectures.
• Experience leading or governing cloud adoption across multiple products, teams, or business units.
Technical Skills
• Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure architecture across compute, networking, storage, IAM, security, and observability, with a primary focus on building and operating AIready platforms.
• Handson experience designing and running shared AI platforms using Kubernetes (EKS/AKS), container orchestration, serverless components, and distributed systems.
• Knowledge of cloud-native networking, hybrid connectivity, VPN/Direct Connect/ExpressRoute, load balancing, and private endpoints.
• Proficiency in InfrastructureasCode (Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation) and automated platform provisioning, including environment standardization and guardrails.
• Strong grasp of resilience patterns, multi-region architectures, disaster recovery, and zero-trust security principles.
• Strong focus on cost governance for AI platforms, including usage metering, quota management, autoscaling controls, and optimization of inference costs.
• Proficiency with Amazon Bedrock and Azure AI Foundry including tenant isolation, identity integration, quota enforcement, networking controls, observability, and enterprisescale deployment patterns.
• Strong LLMOps experience, including model lifecycle management, versioning, prompt/config management, rollout strategies (bluegreen/canary), monitoring, alerting, and operational governance for large language models.
Behavioral Skills
• Strong leadership presence and ability to influence decisions across cross-functional and multi-vendor environments.
• Excellent communicator able to articulate complex architectural concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Structured thinker with a strategic mindset and ability to plan for future-state architectures.
• Pragmatic, collaborative, and able to balance ideal design with delivery constraints.
• Comfortable working in dynamic environments involving ambiguity and evolving technical landscapes.
Desirable / Nice to Have
• Certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect (Professional), Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or equivalent.
• Experience designing internal developer platforms or shared cloud platforms at scale.
• Exposure to enterprise security frameworks, compliance requirements, and cloud governance tooling.
• Experience leading architectural modernization programs or cloud migrations.
• Background in platform engineering, SRE, or distributed systems design.