Location: Madison, WI – will consider remote but they would have to drive (reimbursable) into the Madison office ideally once a month. Ideal location would be surrounding states.
What problem are you trying to solve with this role:
Adding another Solutions Architect to a growing software engineering team to help distribute architectural responsibilities and support an expanding portfolio of cloud initiatives.
The team has a three-year technology roadmap focused on cloud modernization, adopting the newest AWS services, and expanding customer-facing software capabilities.
This is a true hands-on architecture role. They need someone who enjoys remaining technical, designing solutions, and working closely with engineering teams rather than someone focused solely on high-level architecture or oversight.
Who is handling the work if vacated:
Existing architecture and engineering team members are sharing the workload.
The team is small and needs another person to help distribute responsibilities.
Report to:
Engineering / Architecture leadership
Team:
Small, collaborative architecture team.
Will initially work closely with the Customer Engineering team.
Will partner with additional engineering teams over time.
Global engineering organization.
Typical day/week:
Designing and evolving modern cloud architectures within an AWS environment.
Defining application, platform, and data architecture for customer-facing software products.
Working closely with Customer Engineering and collaborating with other engineering groups.
Designing scalable, secure, and highly available cloud solutions.
Supporting data architecture initiatives, particularly MySQL-based solutions.
Helping shape the architecture for software platforms that communicate with connected IoT devices (software integration, not hardware development).
Staying current with emerging AWS services and identifying opportunities to modernize the environment.
Providing technical direction while remaining hands-on with architecture and engineering challenges.
Technical Environment:
AWS cloud environment, with an emphasis on adopting the newest AWS services.
Terraform.
AWS Control Tower.
VPC, Transit Gateway (TGW), and networking.
ECS Fargate.
AWS Lambda, SQS, SNS, and EventBridge.
RDS / Aurora MySQL.
MongoDB.
MySQL and data architecture.
Customer-facing software platforms and cloud-native applications.
Connected IoT software integrations.
Size of Environment:
Small architecture team supporting a growing software engineering organization.
Global engineering environment.
Additional details not provided.
What does success look like in the first 30–60 days?
Become familiar with the existing AWS environment, architecture, applications, and engineering teams.
Establish working relationships with Customer Engineering and the architecture team.
Begin taking ownership of architectural responsibilities and contributing hands-on.
What does success look like in the first 60–90+ days?
Take on a larger share of architectural responsibilities and help distribute the workload across the team.
Contribute to cloud modernization initiatives and the longer-term technology roadmap.
Partner with additional engineering teams to influence architecture decisions and deliver scalable cloud solutions.
Must-haves / What makes someone successful:
Strong hands-on Terraform experience.
5–6+ years of AWS experience.
Hands-on Solutions Architecture experience within a modern AWS environment.
Data architecture experience, including MySQL.
Must enjoy remaining hands-on technically rather than focusing exclusively on architecture strategy or management.
Strong communication and collaboration skills.
Additional Technical Experience – Qualify Individually:
Please identify whether candidates have hands-on experience with each of the following and how many years:
AWS Control Tower
VPC / Transit Gateway (TGW) / Networking
ECS Fargate
Lambda
SQS / SNS
EventBridge
RDS / Aurora MySQL
MongoDB
Plus to have:
Experience building and supporting customer-facing software products.
Experience with cloud-native applications and modern AWS services.
Experience supporting connected IoT software platforms.
Experience working across multiple engineering teams.
Ability to mentor developers and provide architectural guidance while remaining hands-on.
