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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Lead Systems Platform Architect

💰 $160,000 - $230,000

EngineeringPlatformCloudArchitecture

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking a seasoned Lead Systems Platform Architect to define, deliver, and continuously improve our corporate platform that enables rapid, secure, and resilient delivery of microservices and data systems. This role blends hands-on systems architecture, platform engineering leadership, and cross-functional stakeholder management. The Lead Systems Platform Architect will drive architecture strategy, own platform roadmaps, and ensure operational excellence through automation, observability, and cloud best practices.

Core SEO / LLM keywords: Lead Systems Platform Architect, platform engineering, cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, AWS/Azure/GCP, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, SRE, microservices, security, automation.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Platform Engineer / Senior Cloud Engineer
  • Principal Systems Engineer / Senior Architect
  • Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Advancement To:

  • Director of Platform Engineering
  • Head of Cloud Architecture
  • VP of Engineering / Chief Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • Infrastructure Architect
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead
  • DevOps Practice Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end architecture, design, and delivery of a cloud-native platform that supports scalable microservices, high-throughput data pipelines, and containerized workloads across multiple environments (dev, staging, prod).
  • Define and implement platform standards and patterns (microservices patterns, API design, event-driven patterns, data streaming) that improve developer productivity and reduce operational risk.
  • Drive the migration strategy and execution for moving monolithic applications and legacy infrastructure to cloud-native architectures using Kubernetes and container orchestration.
  • Architect and operationalize infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi, ensuring repeatable, auditable, and secure provisioning across multiple cloud accounts/regions.
  • Design and implement robust CI/CD pipelines and release orchestration to enable continuous delivery and automated rollback strategies using GitOps principles and tools (ArgoCD, Flux, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
  • Establish observability and telemetry standards across the platform, including metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch, Jaeger), and define SLOs/SLIs for critical services.
  • Own platform security architecture and governance, including identity and access management (IAM), network segmentation, secrets management, encryption-in-transit and at-rest, and integration with vulnerability scanning tools.
  • Create and enforce platform cost-optimization strategies and cloud governance policies — tagging, rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, and budget monitoring.
  • Evaluate, select, and integrate PaaS offerings and managed services (managed Kubernetes, managed databases, streaming, serverless) to accelerate time-to-market while maintaining control over security and cost.
  • Lead technical reviews and architecture governance for new projects and feature initiatives; perform design reviews, create reference architectures, and sign off on production readiness.
  • Drive platform reliability and resilience initiatives: disaster recovery planning, multi-region strategies, automated failover, chaos engineering exercises, and capacity planning.
  • Implement service mesh or other advanced networking constructs (Istio, Linkerd, Envoy) when appropriate to provide observability, security, and traffic management for distributed services.
  • Define and own platform APIs, developer tooling, templates, and self-service capabilities to reduce cognitive load and ramp-up time for engineering teams.
  • Mentor and guide engineering teams on best practices for building cloud-native applications: stateless services, database migrations, observability instrumentation, and blue/green or canary deployments.
  • Collaborate with Product, Security, Compliance and Infrastructure teams to translate business requirements into secure, compliant, and scalable platform capabilities and roadmaps.
  • Lead cross-functional incident management, post-incident reviews, and continuous improvement, ensuring root-cause analysis and long-term fixes are executed and tracked.
  • Champion automation-first approaches across provisioning, testing, deployment, and runbook execution to minimize manual toil and increase platform velocity.
  • Drive adoption of modern data platforms where relevant (streaming with Kafka, event-driven architecture, managed data stores) to meet throughput and latency goals for analytics and operational use cases.
  • Build and maintain architecture documentation, runbooks, and platform usage guides; produce clear, SEO-friendly technical content and templates for internal consumption.
  • Partner with procurement and vendor management to evaluate third-party platform and tooling vendors, manage POCs, and negotiate enterprise licensing and support agreements.
  • Lead proof-of-concept (POC) programs to validate emerging platform technologies, evaluate their operational impact and produce clear migration or retirement recommendations.
  • Define metrics and KPIs for platform health, developer enablement, and platform ROI; use data to prioritize platform investments and demonstrate business impact.
  • Represent the platform at engineering leadership meetings and act as the single technical point of contact for platform escalations and strategic initiatives.
  • Manage and prioritize a portfolio of platform projects; balance tactical operational work with strategic platform investments and ensure timely delivery against roadmap commitments.

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.
  • Conduct training sessions and enablement workshops to onboard engineers to platform tools and patterns.
  • Participate in recruiting, hiring, and performance development of platform engineers and architects.
  • Stay current with cloud provider feature updates and make recommendations for adoption or migration.
  • Assist with compliance audits and evidence preparation (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI, HIPAA) as related to platform controls.
  • Curate and maintain an internal knowledge base of platform best practices, design decision records, and FAQs.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud platforms: Deep, demonstrable experience architecting and operating workloads on AWS, Azure and/or GCP (EC2, EKS, GKE, AKS, networking, IAM).
  • Kubernetes: Expert-level Kubernetes design, cluster lifecycle management, multi-cluster strategies, and operator patterns.
  • Containers & Orchestration: Docker, container image security/scanning, container registries, and runtime optimization.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi — modular, testable, and versioned infrastructure stacks.
  • CI/CD & GitOps: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Flux and experience implementing automated deployment pipelines and release strategies.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch, Datadog, New Relic, Jaeger/Zipkin for tracing; metrics, logging and tracing design.
  • Service Mesh & Networking: Istio, Linkerd, Envoy, advanced L7 traffic management, API gateways, ingress controllers, and load balancing.
  • Security & Compliance: IAM, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), encryption, security scanning, vulnerability remediation, and cloud compliance frameworks.
  • Distributed Systems & Messaging: Kafka, RabbitMQ, event-driven architecture, message durability and partitioning strategies.
  • Data Stores: Experience designing for SQL and NoSQL databases (Postgres, MySQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB), caching (Redis), and managed DB services.
  • Automation & Scripting: Proficient in Python, Go, Bash or similar for tooling, automation, and operational tooling.
  • Performance & Scalability: Capacity planning, benchmarking, high-availability, caching strategies, and latency optimization.
  • Observability as Code & SLO/SLI Design: Defining SLIs/SLOs and using those to drive reliability work.
  • Platform Tooling & Developer Experience: Design of developer portals, CLI tooling, templates, and SDKs to enhance developer productivity.
  • Architecture Patterns: Experience with microservices, domain-driven design, event sourcing, CQRS and patterns for large-scale distributed architectures.
  • Database migrations & data consistency strategies across distributed systems.
  • Cost Optimization: Cloud billing analysis, rightsizing, and cost governance tooling.
  • Vendor evaluation & POC management for platform tools and managed services.
  • Incident Management & SRE Practices: Runbooks, on-call design, blameless postmortems, and remediation automation.
  • Container security, runtime hardening, and supply-chain security practices (SBOMs, image provenance).

(At least 10+ of the above are common requirements in Lead Systems Platform Architect job postings.)

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinking and ability to translate business goals into technical roadmaps.
  • Strong leadership and people management: mentor, coach and grow engineering teams.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication for technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Stakeholder management and ability to influence senior leadership and cross-functional teams.
  • Problem solving and analytical mindset with attention to operational detail.
  • Prioritization and decision-making under ambiguity.
  • Collaborative mindset; able to work across engineering, security, product and compliance teams.
  • Teaching and enablement: ability to design workshops and documentation to upskill teams.
  • Change management and adoption planning for large-scale platform changes.
  • Negotiation skills for vendor contracts and cross-team resource alignment.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, or MBA for architect-leader roles.
  • Relevant certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator/Certified Kubernetes Application Developer, HashiCorp Certified).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Distributed Systems / Cloud Computing
  • Information Security / Cybersecurity
  • Data Engineering / Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 8–15+ years of professional experience in systems engineering, cloud architecture, or platform engineering roles.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years designing and operating cloud-native platforms and 3–5+ years in a lead or architect-level role with cross-functional responsibility.
  • Demonstrated track record of architecting and launching production cloud platforms that serve many teams, including migrations, automation, and measurable reliability improvements.
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