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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for AWS Cloud Architect

💰 $140,000 - $220,000

CloudAWSArchitectureDevOpsSecurity

🎯 Role Definition

The AWS Cloud Architect is a senior technical leader responsible for designing, implementing, and governing secure, scalable, and cost-effective architectures on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This role partners with product owners, engineering teams, security, and operations to translate business requirements into robust cloud-native solutions—leveraging AWS Well-Architected principles, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), automation, and cloud governance to deliver high-availability services and efficient cloud operations.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Cloud Engineer or Cloud Systems Engineer with 2–4 years of AWS experience
  • Senior DevOps Engineer / Senior Platform Engineer experienced in CI/CD and automation
  • Solutions Architect or Technical Lead with hands-on AWS implementation experience

Advancement To:

  • Principal Cloud Architect / Distinguished Cloud Architect
  • Head of Cloud / Director of Cloud Engineering
  • CTO / VP of Engineering (for smaller organizations)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Security Architect
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Lead
  • Platform Engineering Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design and document scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant architectures on AWS that meet business, performance, and compliance requirements, using the AWS Well-Architected Framework to guide decisions.
  • Lead cloud migration strategies and execute lift-and-shift and cloud-native re-architecture initiatives, including migration planning, application dependency mapping, and phased cutovers to minimize downtime.
  • Author and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates and modules using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or CDK to provision environments reproducibly and securely across multiple accounts and regions.
  • Architect and implement secure networking and hybrid connectivity (VPC design, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN), ensuring appropriate segmentation, routing, and high-availability for multi-region deployments.
  • Define and enforce identity and access management (IAM) strategies, least-privilege policies, roles, and cross-account access patterns; collaborate with security teams to integrate with SSO and federation.
  • Implement containerization and orchestration platforms on AWS (EKS / ECS), providing blueprints for microservices deployments, autoscaling, and resilient service meshes when required.
  • Build and operationalize serverless solutions (AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions) where appropriate, ensuring observability, cold-start mitigation, and deployment automation.
  • Design and manage CI/CD pipelines (CodePipeline, CodeBuild, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD) to automate testing, security scanning, and deployment across dev, staging, and production environments.
  • Establish monitoring, logging, and tracing strategies (CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry, ELK/Opensearch) to provide actionable observability and to detect performance regressions and incidents quickly.
  • Drive cloud cost optimization by defining tagging strategies, rightsizing instances, implementing Reserved Instances/Savings Plans, and leveraging AWS cost management tools and governance controls.
  • Develop disaster recovery and business continuity plans (RTO/RPO analysis), implement backup/restore, cross-region replication, and runbook automation to meet SLA objectives.
  • Lead security architecture reviews and threat modeling, integrating AWS-native security services (GuardDuty, Security Hub, Macie, Config) and third-party tools to enforce compliance and reduce risk.
  • Define multi-account strategy with AWS Organizations, SCPs, consolidated billing, and account provisioning workflows to balance autonomy and governance across teams.
  • Partner with application teams to design data architectures (S3, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift) and data migration strategies, including schema design, replication patterns, and performance tuning.
  • Create and run technical proof-of-concepts (POCs) to validate new AWS services, architectural patterns, or third-party integrations and provide recommendations for adoption or rejection.
  • Standardize platform components, reference architectures, and developer-facing infrastructure blueprints to accelerate feature delivery and reduce technical debt.
  • Drive automation of routine operational tasks (patching, AMI builds, configuration drift detection) using configuration management and automation frameworks.
  • Provide technical leadership in incident response and post-incident reviews (postmortems), identifying root causes, corrective actions, and opportunities to harden architecture and processes.
  • Collaborate with procurement and vendor management to evaluate cloud tooling, managed services, and SaaS partners; negotiate licensing, support, and integration terms.
  • Mentor and upskill engineering teams on cloud best practices, IaC patterns, security posture, and operational excellence through workshops, design reviews, and documentation.
  • Establish deployment governance: approval gates, security/compliance checks, automated testing, and rollback strategies to reduce deployment risk and meet regulatory requirements.
  • Continuously evaluate emerging AWS services and industry trends to advise on technology roadmap, cost/benefit, and migration of legacy workloads to modern cloud-native architectures.
  • Drive performance tuning and capacity planning activities for compute, storage, and database layers to meet latency and throughput SLAs while optimizing costs.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Create and maintain architectural diagrams, runbooks, and playbooks for operational teams and on-call rotations.
  • Review and approve technical designs and pull requests for cloud infrastructure changes that affect platform stability, security, or cost.
  • Participate in vendor evaluations and pilot programs for third-party cloud management, security, and observability platforms.
  • Deliver executive-level summaries and technical briefings to stakeholders, translating architectural trade-offs into business impact.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep expertise in AWS core services: EC2, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudTrail.
  • Strong experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK — including module development, state management, and CI-driven provisioning.
  • Container orchestration and cloud-native patterns: Kubernetes (EKS), ECS, Helm, and associated networking and autoscaling strategies.
  • Proven ability to design and implement CI/CD pipelines and release automation with tools such as CodePipeline, CodeBuild, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or Spinnaker.
  • Cloud security and compliance: IAM policy design, segmentation, encryption (KMS), secrets management (Secrets Manager / HashiCorp Vault), and integration with security tooling (GuardDuty, Security Hub, Config).
  • Networking and hybrid-cloud connectivity: advanced VPC design, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN, DNS, and routing for multi-region architectures.
  • Experience with monitoring, logging, and observability stacks: CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, X-Ray, ELK/Opensearch; ability to create meaningful dashboards and alerts.
  • Cost management and optimization skills: tagging strategy, rightsizing, Reserved Instances/Savings Plans, Cost Explorer, and FinOps practices.
  • Data services and migrations: experience with S3 lifecycle, DMS, Snowball/Snowcone, Redshift, and designing data pipelines for analytics workloads.
  • Automation, scripting and tooling: proficiency in Python, Bash, or TypeScript for automation, and using AWS CLI and SDKs for operational tasks.
  • Experience with high-availability, disaster recovery, and backup strategies for mission-critical systems.
  • knowledge of authentication, federation, and SSO integration patterns (SAML, OIDC, Cognito).
  • Familiarity with infrastructure governance tools and patterns: AWS Organizations, Service Control Policies (SCPs), Guardrails, and landing zone implementations.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills to present complex cloud architecture concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Strategic thinking and the ability to align architecture decisions with business goals and ROI.
  • Leadership and mentorship: guide engineering teams, run architecture review boards, and cultivate best practices.
  • Stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration with product, security, legal, and finance teams.
  • Problem-solving mindset with a bias for automation and repeatable processes.
  • Effective time management and prioritization in fast-paced, deadline-driven environments.
  • Coaching and training aptitude to enable developers and operators to adopt cloud-native patterns.
  • Attention to detail, especially with security, compliance, and cost controls.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning orientation to keep pace with AWS service evolution.
  • Conflict resolution and negotiation skills for trade-offs across performance, cost, and speed of delivery.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, Information Systems, or an MBA with strong technical background is a plus.
  • Professional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, or Specialist-level AWS certifications preferred.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Cloud Computing
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12+ years total IT experience with at least 3–6 years of hands-on AWS architecture and implementation experience.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years of progressive experience designing and operating large-scale cloud environments, with multiple successful cloud migrations and production rollouts.
  • Proven track record in leading cross-functional technical initiatives, implementing IaC at scale, and enforcing cloud governance across multi-account AWS environments.
  • Demonstrated experience with AWS Well-Architected reviews, performance tuning, cost optimization, and security/compliance programs.
  • Experience mentoring teams, managing third-party cloud vendors, and creating repeatable platform patterns for faster delivery.
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