Sr Cloud Architect/ Lead Engineer

Role: Sr Cloud Architect/ Lead Engineer

Location: Remote

Duration: 6 month contract +

Description:

Summary

Senior architecture leadership with hands-on delivery. Validates that the 2.0 environment (ECS/Fargate, built on a ROSA-derived pattern) is right for staging and production, and works hands-on across Infrastructure-as-Code and observability. Owns IAM/security guardrails and networking coordination with the central Cloud team, and partners with the database SME on the Aurora/DMS direction.

Key responsibilities

• Lead architecture and production-readiness validation for staging/prod: ECS/Fargate design and right-sizing, autoscaling, resilience patterns (circuit-breaker / rate-limiting), and the API Gateway decision.
• Work hands-on on Terraform/IaC hardening (remote state DynamoDB locking, decompose state files to limit blast radius, modularization, standards/tags) and on observability (OpenTelemetry ELK/Kibana, CloudWatch).
• Own IAM least-privilege and security guardrails / policy-as-code baseline; coordinate VPC/subnet/Transit Gateway/ALB-NLB and DNS needs with the central Cloud team and align to the landing zone.
• Partner with the fractional database SME and the client's external database firm on Aurora, DMS/CDC validation, and the DB2/SQL Server PostgreSQL consolidation direction.
• Contribute to DR design (AWS DRS / ca-west-1, RTO/RPO); document and transfer knowledge to the client team.

Required skills & experience

• 7+ years AWS; proven cloud/solutions architecture across compute (ECS/Fargate), networking and data; able to validate designs for scale and resilience.
• Hands-on Terraform (state, modules, remote backends) and observability (OpenTelemetry, ELK/Kibana, CloudWatch).
• Strong IAM/security (least-privilege, guardrails, ); working knowledge of VPC/TGW/ALB-NLB sufficient to coordinate with a central Cloud team.
• Aurora PostgreSQL / DMS familiarity to partner with the DB SME; Spring Boot / microservices context a plus.
• AWS certification (Solutions Architect Professional preferred).