Principal AWS Cloud Architect

📋 Job Overview

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, leading and mentoring a blended onshore/offshore delivery team.

🏢 About Megazone

Megazone is a technology company focused on cloud architecture and delivery, providing expert services to clients through skilled technical teams.

🎯 The Role

You'll lead the technical strategy for engagements, acting as the primary technical point of contact for customer leadership. You'll recommend best-fit approaches, make consequential architecture decisions, and set engineering standards by reviewing designs, code, and IaC personally. This role involves hands-on delivery, team leadership, and foundational architecture design.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• 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.
• Recommend best-fit approaches prescriptively and with conviction.
• Make and document consequential architecture decisions.
• Set the engineering standard by example: review designs, code, and IaC personally.
• Work independently as the sole architect on smaller or early-phase engagements.
• Step in hands-on when the project needs it to build foundational environments, execute migration waves, troubleshoot issues, and write Terraform/CDK.
• Lead remediation personally when a workstream needs stabilization.
• Lead and coordinate offshore engineering teams across time zones.
• Mentor consultants and engineers to raise their technical depth, delivery discipline, and customer-facing skill.
• Partner with the Engagement Manager and customer to build an achievable project plan.
• 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.
• 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, and centralized logging and security tooling.
• Implement IAM and Identity Center, guardrails, and security baselines across the account structure.
• 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).
• Lead lift-and-shift replication of physical and VMware-based servers into EC2 using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN).
• 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.

📌 Required 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 IaC tools like Terraform and AWS CDK.

🎁 Benefits

Base Salary $170K – $195K. The above sets forth the annual base salary range in USD for this role exclusive of any discretionary bonus that may be awarded. Actual compensation will be based on an assessment of factors including the successful candidate’s location, experience, skill, and other job-related factors.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

No visa sponsorship or specific eligibility requirements mentioned.