Cloud Architect

We are looking for an experienced AWS Solution Architect for a long term freelance mission to drive the design, implementation, and operationalization of secure, scalable, and resilient cloud solutions. In this role, you will work at the intersection of architecture, infrastructure, and operations, ensuring that AWS workloads are designed for performance, automation, cost efficiency, and operational excellence. You will collaborate closely with platform, DevOps, networking, security, and operations teams to turn business and technical requirements into robust end-to-end architectures. You will set the direction for cloud adoption, define best practices, and guide teams through the full lifecycle—from design to run. Key Responsibilities Architectural Leadership - Design AWS cloud architectures that are scalable, maintainable, secure, and aligned with enterprise and operational requirements. Identify opportunities for cost optimization, performance improvements, and platform-level innovation. Establish and maintain AWS architectural standards, patterns, and guardrails in collaboration with Infra & Operations. Solution Engineering & Technical Guidance -Provide hands-on solution design for applications and platforms hosted on AWS. Review cloud architectures and operational setups to ensure high availability, resilience, observability, and performance. Support teams in making informed architectural trade-offs across compute, storage, networking, security, and automation. Guide the adoption of IaC (Terraform / CloudFormation), GitOps, and automated provisioning practices. Collaboration with Infra & Ops - Partner with Infrastructure & Operations teams on topics such as networking, security, monitoring, backup/DR, patching, and lifecycle management. Work with DevOps and platform engineering to define CI/CD integration, automated deployments, and environment consistency. Facilitate architecture reviews, solution workshops, and operational readiness assessments. Operational Excellence & Delivery Support- Support development and operations teams during build, deployment, and operational phases. Contribute to incident resolution, root cause analysis, and optimization of cloud environments. Define and improve runbooks, operational dashboards, performance tuning strategies, and high-availability designs. Ensure cloud solutions meet enterprise requirements for security, compliance, disaster recovery, and cost governance. Innovation & Continuous Improvement -Evaluate AWS services, architectural trends, and emerging technologies to strengthen the cloud platform. Promote cloud-native practices such as serverless, event-driven architectures, containerization, and managed services. Drive knowledge sharing and mentor engineers, platform specialists, and operations teams. Who are you? Experience & Qualifications: 8–10+ years of experience in system architecture, cloud engineering, or infrastructure solution design. At least 3–5 years in AWS solution architecture in an enterprise environment. Strong background in infrastructure, cloud networking, security, and/or operations. Experience integrating applications with enterprise platforms, data services, and APIs. Technical Skills - Deep expertise with AWS services (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, CloudFront, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, Systems Manager, etc.). Solid understanding of cloud networking, identity & access management, observability, resilience patterns, and cost optimization. Hands-on experience with IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines, containers, and automation frameworks. Strong grasp of DevOps, SRE principles, monitoring, incident management, and operational lifecycle practices. Familiarity with microservices, API-driven integration, and event-driven architectures. Soft Skills - Strong communication skills with the ability to connect technical and operational concepts. Comfortable interacting with platform, security, operations, and business stakeholders. Ability to lead by influence, mentor teams, and drive consensus among cross-functional groups. Analytical mindset with strong decision-making and problem-solving capabilities. Preferred Skills - AWS certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, DevOps Engineer, Security Specialty). Experience in Agile or SAFe environments. Background with hybrid cloud, on-prem integrations, or modernization programs. Industry experience in logistics or similar large-scale, operations-heavy environments.