Staff Cloud Architect (Houston)

This role is based in Houston, TX and requires working onsite 2 days per week. 

As a member of the Enterprise Technology Development Team, the Staff Cloud Architect provides architecture leadership for Empyrean's cloud platforms, enterprise applications, and modernization initiatives.

This is a staff-level individual contributor role that combines long term platform strategy with deep hands-on technical execution.

The Staff Cloud Architect translates business, security, and operational requirements into scalable, reliable, and supportable cloud solutions across AWS and Kubernetes environments.  This role reviews architecture designs, challenges assumptions, identifies risks early, and guides engineering teams from initial design through production. The Staff Cloud Architect establishes practical cloud platform standards including Kubernetes standards, reference architectures, deployment patterns, and decision-making practices while partnering closely with engineers, Security, QA, and technical leadership across multiple teams.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Translate business and application requirements into end-to-end cloud solutions across compute, networking, storage, identity, security.
• Evaluate architectures for cloud best practices, security, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Lead architecture and design reviews, challenge assumptions, evaluate options, and document decisions, tradeoffs, dependencies, and risks.
• Assess existing systems and cloud environments to identify gaps, technical debt, failure points, and opportunities for modernization, consolidation, and automation.
• Set architectural direction for infrastructure as code including reusable module patterns, state and environment strategies, policy guardrails, drift management, and safe promotion practices.
• Define technical milestones, manage dependencies and risks, and support delivery within the team’s Kanban and release cadence.
• Define and maintain reusable cloud reference architectures and patterns for areas such as multi-account design, networking, identity and access, compute, containers, data, integration, observability, and disaster recovery.
• Apply AWS Well-Architected principles to improve operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for application and infrastructure delivery, including plan/apply workflows, promotion gates, rollback strategies, and release evidence collection.
• Remain hands-on by developing proofs of concept, leading technical spikes, reviewing code and infrastructure changes, and helping teams resolve complex design or implementation issues.
• Include cost modeling and cloud financial management considerations in architecture decisions, balancing business value, delivery speed, operational risk, and long-term total cost of ownership.
• Use production incidents, operational data, and architecture reviews to recommend long-term remediation and maintain a prioritized architecture improvement roadmap.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads, raise architecture capability through reusable guidance and coaching, and communicate recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Evaluate industry trends and recommend pragmatic improvements to platform architecture, developer experience, and delivery practices within supported value streams.

REQUIRED SKILLS AND ABILITIES

• Deep hands-on AWS architecture experience across core services, including VPC, IAM, EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, Route 53, CloudFront, CloudWatch, KMS, and related networking and security controls.
• Strong Kubernetes architecture and operations experience, including cluster design, workload scheduling, ingress, service networking, security, scaling, upgrades, and observability.
• Ability to establish architecture governance, review standards, technical guardrails, and decision-making processes across multiple teams.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems and cloud architecture patterns, including APIs, asynchronous and event-driven integration, data flows, service boundaries, caching, and failure handling.
• Strong understanding of enterprise and hybrid-cloud architecture, including connectivity, DNS, identity, network segmentation, shared services, and integration with on-premises systems.
• Advanced Terraform and infrastructure-as-code experience, including reusable modules, remote state, environment isolation, policy validation, drift detection, and secure deployment workflows.
• Strong CI/CD and automation experience for application and infrastructure delivery; experience with GitHub Actions and scripting languages such as Bash, PowerShell, or Python is preferred.
• Strong cloud security architecture skills, including least-privilege IAM, encryption and key management, secrets management, data protection, threat modeling, auditability, and compliance controls.
• Demonstrated ability to design for availability, resilience, disaster recovery, performance, scalability, operability, and maintainability using measurable non-functional requirements.
• Strong observability and operational architecture skills, including metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, incident analysis, and long-term remediation planning
• Ability to evaluate cost and operational tradeoffs, create reasonable cost estimates, and incorporate cost optimization into architecture decisions.
• Familiarity with the .NET ecosystem and modern application development practices is preferred.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and influencing skills, with the ability to build alignment across Product, Engineering, QA, Security, Operations, and senior technical leadership without relying on direct authority.

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND/OR EDUCATION

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field is preferred; equivalent practical experience will be considered.
• 10+ years of technology experience, including at least 5 years leading the design and implementation of cloud or enterprise architectures in production environments.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and implementing solutions on AWS or a comparable public cloud platform, with strong current AWS expertise.
• Practical experience in designing and operating Kubernetes-based platforms in production is required.
• Proven experience leading architecture for enterprise-scale, highly available, secure, and observable systems across multiple applications or teams.
• Proven experience with cloud migration, application modernization, hybrid integration, or platform transformation initiatives from planning through implementation.
• Experience working in regulated or security-sensitive environments and incorporating security, privacy, compliance, and audit requirements into solution designs.
• Demonstrated success leading technical decisions across organizational boundaries, mentoring engineers, and influencing senior stakeholders without direct management responsibility.
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or a comparable advanced cloud certification is preferred but not required.
• Experience with benefits administration and Health & Welfare domains is a plus; equivalent combinations of education, experience, and training will be considered.

Disclaimer: Managers have the right to assign or redesign the responsibilities of the above-mentioned job description without notice and at any time

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