AWS Cloud Architect

Our client is seeking an AWS Cloud Architect to design, secure and scale cloud infrastructure in the Washington, DC market. This is a senior architecture role owning technical direction rather than executing someone else's design you will set standards, make platform decisions, and be accountable for how the environment performs under load and under audit.

The work spans greenfield architecture, migration of existing workloads, and remediation of environments that were built quickly and now need to scale. You will work directly with engineering, security and stakeholder teams, and will be expected to defend design decisions in review.

Architecture & Design

• Design multi-account AWS architectures using Organizations, Control Tower, landing zones and service control policies.
• Define network architecture across VPCs, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, PrivateLink and hybrid connectivity to on-premises data centers.
• Architect for high availability, disaster recovery and defined RTO/RPO targets across regions and availability zones.
• Produce high-level and low-level design documentation to a standard that withstands formal architecture review.
• Select compute, storage and database services appropriate to workload characteristics rather than defaulting to familiar patterns.

Security & Compliance

• Implement identity and access architecture using IAM, SSO, federation and least-privilege role design.
• Design encryption, key management and data protection controls using KMS, Secrets Manager and Certificate Manager.
• Build logging, monitoring and audit capability with CloudTrail, Config, GuardDuty, Security Hub and CloudWatch.
• Align architecture to applicable compliance frameworks — [FedRAMP / NIST 800-53 / FISMA / CMMC / SOC 2 / HIPAA — specify].

Automation & Delivery

• Define infrastructure-as-code standards using Terraform, CloudFormation or CDK, and enforce them across teams.
• Design CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation for both infrastructure and application workloads.
• Establish cost management practices — tagging strategy, budgets, rightsizing, reserved capacity and savings plans.

Leadership

• Serve as the technical authority on cloud architecture decisions, including where to say no.
• Mentor engineers and raise the team's cloud capability rather than concentrating knowledge in one person.
• Partner with security, compliance and business stakeholders to translate requirements into architecture.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Additional AWS certifications — Security Specialty, Advanced Networking Specialty, or DevOps Engineer Professional.
• AWS GovCloud experience and familiarity with the differences from commercial regions.
• FedRAMP authorization experience, including ATO package support and continuous monitoring.
• NIST 800-53 or CMMC control implementation in a cloud environment.
• Kubernetes and container orchestration — EKS, ECS, Fargate.
• Experience in a federal contracting or public sector environment.
• Multi-cloud exposure — Azure or Google Cloud Platform alongside AWS.