Principal Technical Architect - AWS Architecture

Architecture & design
Designs scalable, secure, cost-efficient cloud solutions aligned to business needs; defines reference architectures and design patterns; leads well-architected framework reviews across the five (or six) pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

Migration & modernization
Plans and executes migrations from on-prem or other clouds to AWS; assesses workloads for re-host, re-platform, or re-architect strategies; modernizes legacy applications toward microservices, containers, and serverless.

Security & compliance
Designs IAM policies, network segmentation (VPC, subnets, security groups), encryption, and identity federation; ensures compliance with standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, or PCI-DSS as relevant; implements least-privilege access and governance guardrails (SCPs, Control Tower, Organizations).

Infrastructure as Code & automation
Builds and maintains IaC using CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform; automates provisioning, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment workflows; drives DevOps and GitOps practices.

Cost management
Optimizes spend through right-sizing, reserved/spot instances, savings plans, and tagging strategies; monitors cost via Cost Explorer and Budgets; advises on FinOps practices.

Reliability & scalability
Designs for high availability, disaster recovery, multi-region/multi-AZ resilience; sets up auto-scaling, load balancing, and fault-tolerant architectures; defines RTO/RPO strategies.

Monitoring & operations
Implements observability using CloudWatch, X-Ray, and third-party tools; establishes logging, alerting, and incident response processes; supports operational runbooks.

Stakeholder & technical leadership
Collaborates with engineering, security, and business teams to translate requirements into technical solutions; mentors developers and junior architects; documents architecture decisions (ADRs) and presents to leadership; stays current with new AWS services and industry best practices; often holds certifications like AWS Solutions Architect Professional or AWS Security Specialty.

Data & AI/ML enablement (increasingly common)
Architects data lakes, analytics pipelines, and ML platforms using services like S3, Redshift, Glue, SageMaker, and Bedrock.