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 certificat