Principal Cloud Architect

What you'll do

• Own the cloud reference architectures for landing zones, networking, identity, and workload patterns across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
• Design and maintain the "paved road" of golden patterns and guardrails to enable engineering teams to ship code faster.
• Serve as the primary escalation point for complex cloud design decisions and cross-cutting technical problems across the portfolio.
• Embed zero-trust security, network segmentation, and resilience standards into all reference architectures by default.
• Manage cloud cost architecture by applying FinOps discipline to ensure design decisions are tied to concrete dollar impacts.
• Provide the cloud infrastructure architecture for AI/ML capabilities, including model serving and multi-model orchestration patterns.
• Author cloud standards enforced as automated gates and provide directional recommendations on emerging cloud-native services.
• Coach senior engineers and solution architects through design reviews to raise technical standards without direct reporting authority.

What we're looking for

• 12+ years in technology with deep, hands-on cloud architecture experience at Aetna Technology scale.
• Expert-level AWS architecture knowledge in compute, networking, identity, data, and security.
• Working proficiency in GCP and Azure to make sound multicloud placement and design calls.
• Demonstrated ownership of landing zones, reference architectures, and paved-road or golden-path patterns.
• Strong command of cloud security, zero-trust architecture, identity, segmentation, and blast-radius reduction.
• Working knowledge of FinOps and cost-aware architecture to tie design decisions to dollar impact.
• Experience in healthcare, health insurance, or similarly regulated industries.
• Hands-on background with AI/ML platform infrastructure, including model serving and multi-model orchestration.
• Relevant cloud certifications, such as AWS Solutions Architect Professional.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automated policy or guardrail enforcement.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field or equivalent experience.