This role pays less than
83%
of similar roles. Most pay
$156,687–$229,312
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$145k
versus about
$193k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Cognizant
Cognizant is a multinational IT services and consulting company offering digital transformation, technology, and business process services. It serves clients across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and other industries worldwide.
Cognizant currently has
17 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$140,000–$160,000
across 12 roles with salary data.
The Principal Cloud Platform Architect joins the IoT Practice to drive operational maturity, scalability, and reliability for the CONNECT Platform. This strategic role involves designing and optimizing large-scale cloud-native architectures across Azure and AWS environments while improving platform performance and cost efficiency. The architect will research cloud-native patterns, manage Kubernetes-based environments, and develop advanced workload scheduling and resource optimization strategies. Key responsibilities include establishing disaster recovery plans, enhancing observability through logging and tracing, and leading proof-of-concept initiatives. Technical requirements include expertise in Azure AKS, AWS EKS, Terraform, Bicep, and GitOps tools like ArgoCD and GitHub Actions. The role focuses on solving complex problems related to multi-tenant architecture, high availability, and fault tolerance for distributed systems while mentoring engineering teams on platform engineering best practices and modern automation within the cloud-native ecosystem.
Research and validate cloud-native architectural patterns to improve scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency.
Design and optimize large-scale deployments on Azure AKS and AWS EKS environments.
Develop advanced workload scheduling, auto-scaling, and resource optimization strategies for multi-tenant platforms.
Architect highly available, fault-tolerant systems with defined disaster recovery and resiliency strategies.
Improve platform observability through comprehensive logging, metrics, tracing, and monitoring frameworks.
Drive cloud cost optimization initiatives by analyzing infrastructure consumption and developing scalable cost-control models.
Design large-scale performance and resiliency test scenarios to simulate real-world customer workloads.
Lead proof-of-concept initiatives and mentor engineering teams on cloud-native best practices.
What we're looking for
12+ years of overall software or cloud engineering experience.
5+ years of hands-on Kubernetes architecture and administration experience.
Expert-level experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and associated cloud services.
Deep expertise in Kubernetes internals including control plane, scheduling, networking, service mesh, and resource management.
Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and Bicep.
Experience implementing GitOps practices using ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
Strong knowledge of observability tools including Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and Azure Monitor.
Deep understanding of distributed systems, high availability, fault tolerance, and multi-tenancy (preferred); experience with SRE, FinOps, and Istio or Linkerd (preferred).