Principal AWS Cloud Architect

About the Role

The Principal AWS Cloud Architect is a lead-level technical role on our cloud engagements. You'll own the technical direction of a workstream or engagement end to end, working with the customer's technical teams to set strategy and drive it to a documented, agreed target state.

This is a leadership role that stays hands-on. You'll lead and mentor a blended onshore/offshore delivery team. When the project calls for it, you'll roll up your sleeves and build: designing landing zones, running migration waves, and writing and reviewing IaC yourself. You're equally comfortable leading a team of engineers or working independently as the sole architect on a project.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Own the technical strategy for the engagement and drive it to a documented, agreed target state.

• Act as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's technical leadership on architecture, sequencing, and risk; drive discussions to decisions rather than leaving them open.

• Recommend best-fit approaches prescriptively and with conviction, backed by delivery experience. Say so clearly when the customer's preferred path is the wrong one.

• Make and document consequential architecture decisions, including trade-offs considered and those deliberately deferred.

• Set the engineering standard by example: review designs, code, and IaC personally.

• Hands-On Delivery

• Work independently as the sole architect on smaller or early-phase engagements, owning design and build without a supporting team.

• Step in hands-on when the project needs it to:

• build foundational environments

• execute migration waves

• troubleshoot replication and cutover issues

• write Terraform/CDK

• Lead remediation personally when a workstream needs stabilization.

• Team Leadership & Offshore Coordination

• Lead and coordinate offshore engineering teams across time zones: assign and sequence work, set clear acceptance criteria, and run effective handoffs so progress continues around the clock.

• Review offshore deliverables (designs, IaC, runbooks, migration plans) for quality and consistency before they reach the customer.

• Mentor consultants and engineers to raise their technical depth, delivery discipline, and customer-facing skill. Unblock them quickly and help them grow into more senior roles.

• Partner with the Engagement Manager and customer to build an achievable project plan with realistic milestones and dependencies.

• Confirm the team has the right skill mix and capacity; escalate gaps early.

• Coordinate technical execution alongside partner consultants and other vendor teams in an Agile delivery model.

• Contribute to the development and refinement of new delivery offerings, reusable assets, and best practices.

• Foundational Architecture

• Design and deploy AWS foundational environments using Control Tower and Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA).

• Define and implement multi-account strategy, covering:

• AWS Organizations and OU structure

• account vending

• SCPs

• centralized logging and security tooling

• Implement IAM and Identity Center, guardrails, and security baselines across the account structure.

• Migration Execution

• Lead discovery and assessment of on-premises estates: application dependency mapping, right-sizing analysis, and migration wave planning.

• Determine the right migration strategy per workload (rehost or replatform), balancing speed, risk, and long-term operating cost.

• Lead lift-and-shift replication of physical and VMware-based servers into EC2 using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), including image conversion and OS/driver remediation.

• Direct replatforming onto managed AWS services: self-managed databases to RDS, load balancers to ALB/NLB, static content to CloudFront.

• Own hybrid connectivity design: Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, Transit Gateway, DNS, and Active Directory integration.

• Oversee storage and database migrations (DMS, DataSync, Storage Gateway, Snow Family) and validate data integrity.

• Set standards for IaC (Terraform, AWS CDK), pipeline automation, and operational readiness before workloads reach production.

• Produce and review design documents, migration runbooks, diagrams, decision records, and hand-over guides.

Qualifications

• 15+ years designing and operating infrastructure, including 5+ years in a lead or principal architect role on customer-facing engagements.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or similar.

• Demonstrated hands-on AWS depth. You have personally built production systems, not only managed teams that built them, and can still do so today.

• Proven ability to work independently as the sole architect on a project, from design through delivery.

• Experience leading and mentoring offshore or distributed engineering teams, including delegating work, reviewing quality, and coordinating across time zones.

• Experience setting technical strategy for an engagement and coordinating with customer technical leadership.

• Hands-on experience building AWS foundational environments: Control Tower, Landing Zone Accelerator, AWS Organizations, and multi-account architecture.

• Demonstrated experience with large-scale, multi-wave cloud migrations.

• Practical experience executing rehost and replatform migrations, and the judgment to recommend the right approach per workload.

• Hands-on experience with AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), AWS Migration Hub, and VM Import/Export.

• Strong AWS networking fundamentals: VPC design, routing, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect/VPN, and DNS.

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and AWS CDK) and at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or PowerShell).

• Current ability to review code and IaC, not just architecture diagrams.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present to both customer executives and engineering teams.

• Active AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional certification required. An additional AWS Specialty certification (e.g., Security, Advanced Networking, or Machine Learning) is a plus.

• Experience with AWS Transform (including AWS Transform for VMware) is a significant plus.

• Why You'll Love It Here

• Our Product is Our People: We live by this. We invest in people who invest in themselves. Your growth is our growth.

• True Servant Leadership: Our CTO leads with a "force multiplier" philosophy. Management is here to empower you and clear roadblocks, not to micromanage. We won't ask you to do anything we're not willing to do ourselves.

• Flat Organization, Real Impact: Your voice and designs will directly shape our technical roadmap and our clients' success. You'll work on the latest tech to solve real problems.

• A "Learn-from-it" Culture: We're moving fast and building new things. We believe mistakes are learning opportunities, not failures.

• We seek diverse talent who are ready to make an immediate impact. We believe that innovation thrives when teams are built with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you are excited by this mission, we encourage you to apply, even if your experience doesn't perfectly match every qualification listed.

• Megazone Cloud is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participates in E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of all new hires.