Cloud Platforms Architect

Job Title: Cloud Platforms Architect

Location: SFO, CA

Duration: long term contract

About the Role

We are seeking a highly experienced, technically strong, and deliverydriven Onsite Lead / Principal Architect to lead our Data Infrastructure Platforms function. This role owns the architecture, execution, and operational excellence of cloud-based data platform capabilities including provisioning and automation, platform reliability, governance enablement, and secure scalable delivery.

You will act as the primary onsite leader partnering with the Cloud Platforms Head, coordinating with Offshore teams, and collaborating with internal platform consumers such as Analytics Platform teams and Data Governance. The ideal candidate blends deep hands-on platform architecture with strong Agile execution and stakeholder leadership.

Key Responsibilities

1) Leadership & Agile Delivery Ownership

- Serve as the onsite leader for the Data Infrastructure Platforms engineering team, ensuring high-quality and predictable delivery across initiatives.

- Own day-to-day execution: sprint planning, backlog refinement, grooming, reviews/demos, retrospectives, and release readiness.

- Manage and streamline intake, prioritization, and execution using Aha! and Jira.

- Partner with Offshore team leads for global execution.

- Proactively manage risks, dependencies, and cross-team impacts.

- Establish delivery metrics and continuously improve team performance.

2) Platform Architecture & Technical Leadership

- Provide architectural leadership for enterprise cloud data infrastructure and platform services.

- Design scalable, secure, cost-efficient reference architectures for ingestion, ELT/ETL, orchestration, and Lakehouse patterns.

- Review and approve solution designs ensuring alignment with architecture, security, and operational standards.

- Drive engineering excellence across CI/CD, observability, automation.

3) Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) & GitOps Delivery (Argo CD)

- Own infrastructure provisioning using Terraform.

- Establish Terraform best practices: modularization, versioning, state management.

- Lead GitOps-based Kubernetes deployments using Argo CD.

- Oversee updates to Kubernetes workloads through Argo CD workflows.

4) Databricks Architecture, Governance & Security Enablement

- Own architecture and lifecycle management for Databricks on AWS.

- Drive governance with Unity Catalog and integrations with metadata platforms.

- Define best practices for notebooks, pipelines, security, Delta Lake workflows.

5) Stakeholder Management & Cross-Team Collaboration

- Serve as the onsite contact for Analytics Platforms and Data Governance.

- Manage intake, prioritization, solution shaping, estimation, and expectation alignment.

- Communicate platform strategy, standards, and decisions clearly.

6) Operational Excellence & Reliability

- Own operational health: incidents, RCA, SLAs/SLOs.

- Drive observability, cost optimization, and compliance.

- Maintain documentation: architecture diagrams, SOPs, playbooks.

Required Qualifications

- 15+ years in cloud platforms, data engineering, or enterprise architecture.

- Strong AWS experience (Redshift, Glue, Athena, MWAA, EKS).

- Experience with Databricks, DBT, Fivetran.

- Strong Terraform and Argo CD expertise.

- Proven global team leadership.

- Strong Agile delivery experience.

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with governance/catalog tools (Atlan, Collibra, Alation).

- AWS certifications.

- Experience with CI/CD, policy enforcement.

- Exposure to analytics platforms (Posit, Tableau, Spotfire, UBI).

Personal Attributes

- Strong ownership mindset.

- Balances architecture and execution.

- Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

- Calm under pressure and improvementoriented.