Cloud Architect

Job Title

Cloud Architect

About the Role

We are building an internal, JSON-driven, policy-governed cloud provisioning and governance platform for a regulated financial services environment. As Cloud Architect, you will define the target architecture, landing-zone standards and multi-cloud strategy that this platform enforces, with GCP as the primary cloud and AWS as the second. You will work closely with the platform engineering team, security, risk and senior business stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the reference deployment architecture for cloud environments: landing zones, network topology, identity, security and resource hierarchy, starting with GCP and then mapped to AWS.
• Design the cloud-neutral patterns, standards and environment archetypes (pre-approved templates) that automation will provision.
• Guide the Infrastructure-as-Code approach: Terraform module design, versioning, state management and registry-driven provisioning.
• Architect for security and compliance in a regulated setting: IAM, org policies/SCPs, encryption, private connectivity, logging and audit trail.
• Define networking architecture: Shared VPC, hub-and-spoke, hybrid connectivity (Interconnect/VPN), DNS, firewalling and segmentation.
• Design for resilience, DR, cost optimization and FinOps (labelling/tagging, budgets, rightsizing).
• Review designs from engineering and application teams, and run architecture review boards.
• Partner with governance and policy teams so regulatory requirements translate into enforceable cloud controls.
• Support AI/ML workload architecture (Vertex AI, GPU/TPU capacity, data access patterns) on the platform.
• Mentor engineers, create architecture documentation and present to director-level stakeholders.

Required Skills

• Deep, hands-on GCP architecture experience: resource hierarchy and organization policies, VPC/Shared VPC, IAM, GKE, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud KMS, VPC Service Controls, Cloud Logging/Monitoring.
• Strong AWS experience: Organizations/Control Tower, VPC, IAM, EC2, EKS, S3, KMS, CloudTrail/Config.
• Expert-level Terraform and an understanding of IaC governance (module registries, policy-as-code, drift control).
• Strong networking and security fundamentals for regulated environments.
• Experience designing multi-account/multi-project landing zones at enterprise scale.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD, Git-based workflows and configuration management (Ansible).
• Excellent communication, with the ability to present trade-offs and decisions to senior stakeholders.

Good to Have

• Azure architecture familiarity (management groups, VNets, Entra ID).
• Python scripting, and understanding of JSON-schema-driven automation.
• Policy-as-code tools (OPA/Rego, Sentinel, Checkov) and cloud governance frameworks.
• Experience with banking or financial services regulations and audit requirements.
• Cloud-native AI/ML platform experience (Vertex AI, SageMaker).

Certifications:

Google Professional Cloud Architect (strongly preferred), AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Terraform Associate/Professional