About This Role
Building an internal, JSON-driven, policy-governed cloud provisioning and governance platform for a regulated financial services environment is at the core of this role. As a Cloud Architect, you will define the target architecture, landing-zone standards, and multi-cloud strategy that this platform enforces, primarily using GCP and secondarily AWS. You will collaborate closely with the platform engineering team, security, risk, and senior business stakeholders.
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.
Requirements
- 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.
Nice to have:
- Azure architecture familiarity (management groups, VNets, Entra ID).
- Python scripting, and understanding of JSON-schema-driven automation.
