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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Solutions Architect

💰 $110,000 - $200,000

CloudArchitectureDevOpsSolutionsInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

A Cloud Solutions Architect designs, develops, and drives enterprise cloud architecture and migration strategies across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. The role partners with engineering, security, product, and operations teams to translate business goals into scalable, secure, cost‑efficient cloud solutions using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). The Cloud Solutions Architect leads technical decision-making, provides governance and best practices for cloud adoption, validates reference architectures, and acts as a trusted advisor to stakeholders and executive leadership.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Software Engineer with cloud project experience
  • DevOps Engineer / SRE with infrastructure and automation background
  • Systems Architect or Infrastructure Engineer with networking/cloud exposure

Advancement To:

  • Principal Cloud Architect / Lead Cloud Architect
  • Head of Cloud / Director of Cloud Engineering
  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO) / VP of Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Lead
  • Infrastructure or Platform Engineer
  • Security Architect (Cloud Security)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect and document end-to-end cloud solutions and reference architectures that align with business objectives, technical constraints, and compliance requirements across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including multi‑region and hybrid-cloud designs.
  • Lead large-scale cloud migration programs from on-premises data centers to public cloud providers, creating migration plans, runbooks, cutover strategies, and rollback procedures while minimizing downtime and business risk.
  • Design and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, ARM templates, or Google Deployment Manager to enable repeatable, auditable infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle management.
  • Define and enforce cloud governance models, tagging strategies, resource hierarchy (accounts, subscriptions, projects), and policy-as-code to ensure cost control, security baseline, and operational consistency.
  • Collaborate with security and compliance teams to design cloud-native security controls, identity and access management (IAM) policies, encryption at rest and in transit, key management, and monitoring for standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC2, and GDPR.
  • Design resilient, highly available, and disaster‑recovery capable systems using multi-AZ, multi-region, failover, and backup strategies, including RTO/RPO planning and continuous validation.
  • Create and optimize CI/CD pipelines and developer workflows for microservices and serverless architectures using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalent tools to reduce lead time and increase deployment frequency.
  • Lead proof-of-concept (POC) evaluations for new cloud services and third-party SaaS products, driving technical vendor selection and producing TCO/ROI analyses to support procurement decisions.
  • Define operational runbooks, SLOs/SLIs, and monitoring strategies using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch or Stackdriver to ensure production reliability and observability.
  • Provide hands-on guidance and technical leadership during sprint execution and critical incidents, participating in incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortems to drive remediation and prevention.
  • Design network architecture in the cloud, including VPC/VNet topology, subnets, routing, transit gateways, VPN/Direct Connect, load balancing, and hybrid connectivity for secure and performant applications.
  • Implement container orchestration and platform solutions (Kubernetes, EKS, AKS, GKE) and design platform patterns for multi-tenant clusters, service meshes, and autoscaling strategies.
  • Deliver cloud cost-management and optimization programs: rightsizing instances, reserved/spot instance strategies, savings plans, and budget/alerting mechanisms to reduce cloud spend and improve unit economics.
  • Mentor engineering teams on cloud best practices, architecture patterns, performance tuning, capacity planning, and platform adoption through architecture reviews, brown-bags, and design workshops.
  • Write and maintain solution documentation, architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and migration playbooks that scale knowledge across engineering organizations and internal stakeholders.
  • Design secure data architectures for analytics and machine learning workloads, including data lakes, managed databases, streaming (Kafka/PubSub), ETL pipelines, and access controls that meet throughput and latency requirements.
  • Conduct architecture reviews, technical due diligence, and risk assessments for new programs, M&A integration, and vendor integrations to validate security, compliance, and operational readiness.
  • Partner with product management and business stakeholders to translate product roadmaps into cloud architecture requirements, ensuring alignment of capabilities and timelines.
  • Drive automation for day‑2 operations including auto-remediation, health checks, patching, and lifecycle management to reduce manual toil and improve MTTR.
  • Design and implement serverless solutions (Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Functions) where appropriate to accelerate development velocity and reduce infrastructure management costs.
  • Establish and operationalize multi-account/multi-project security baselines, guardrails, and centralized logging/alerting systems to improve governance and traceability across teams.

Secondary Functions

  • Provide ad-hoc technical analysis, cost modeling, and feasibility studies to support business cases and executive decision-making.
  • Assist implementation teams with troubleshooting complex cloud performance, networking, and security issues as an escalation point.
  • Contribute to the organization's cloud strategy, roadmap, and platform roadmap by identifying gaps, proposing improvements, and piloting new cloud services.
  • Collaborate with data engineering and analytics teams to ensure secure, performant access to data stores and to support data-driven initiatives.
  • Participate in Agile ceremonies, architecture grooming sessions, and sprint planning to align cloud work with development cycles.
  • Conduct training sessions and enablement programs for engineering teams on cloud-native patterns, IaC, and deployment best practices.
  • Help craft procurement specifications, RFPs, and vendor evaluations for cloud-managed services and third-party platforms.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expertise designing cloud architectures across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform with proven deployments in production.
  • Deep knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools: Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, or equivalent, including state management and modularization.
  • Strong experience with container platforms and orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), Helm, and service mesh technologies (Istio/Linkerd).
  • Proficiency building CI/CD pipelines and developer workflows using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalent automation tools.
  • Solid networking knowledge: VPCs/VNets, routing, transit gateways, hybrid connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute), DNS, and firewalls.
  • Cloud security and compliance expertise: IAM, KMS, Secrets Management, WAFs, encryption, logging, and knowledge of regulations (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR).
  • Experience with cloud databases and storage: RDS/Cloud SQL, DynamoDB/Cosmos/Firestore, S3/Blob Storage, data lakes, and object storage patterns.
  • Observability and monitoring tool experience: CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stacks, and centralized logging/alerting.
  • Proficiency in scripting and automation: Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar for tooling and operational automation.
  • Cost optimization and cloud financial governance skills, including tagging strategies, budget alerts, reserved instances/savings plans, and cost allocation.
  • Familiarity with serverless patterns, message streaming (Kafka/PubSub), and event-driven architectures for scalable designs.
  • Strong understanding of DevSecOps principles and implementing security-as-code and policy-as-code (e.g., OPA, Sentinel, AWS Config).

Soft Skills

  • Excellent verbal and written communication for translating complex cloud concepts into business and technical documentation.
  • Strong stakeholder management and advisory skills to influence product owners, engineering leads, and executive sponsors.
  • Leadership and mentorship capability to uplift engineering teams and drive architectural consistency across the organization.
  • Analytical problem-solving orientation with demonstrated ability to make data-driven decisions under ambiguity.
  • Prioritization and project management skills to balance architectural initiatives, migrations, and operational responsibilities.
  • Customer-centric mindset with the ability to understand business requirements and align architecture to deliver measurable outcomes.
  • Collaborative team player who can operate effectively across distributed, cross-functional teams.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning attitude to evaluate and adopt new cloud services and patterns.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, Information Technology, or MBA for senior/executive-facing positions.
  • Relevant professional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or Google Professional Cloud Architect.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cybersecurity / Information Assurance
  • Cloud Computing

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5 – 12 years of progressive experience in software engineering, infrastructure, or cloud architecture roles with at least 3+ years focused on cloud architecture and migrations.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years overall experience with a minimum of 4+ years architecting production workloads in one or more public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and demonstrable experience leading cloud transformation programs.
  • Proven track record of delivering large-scale cloud migration projects, designing secure, scalable cloud platforms, and mentoring engineering teams.
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