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cloud platform architect

title: Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Platform Architect
salary: $ - $
categories: [Cloud, Architecture, DevOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering]
description: A comprehensive overview of the key responsibilities, required technical skills and professional background for the role of a Cloud Platform Architect.
Hiring: Cloud Platform Architect — seasoned cloud architecture and platform engineering leader to design, build, and operate secure, scalable, cost-efficient multi-cloud platforms. Responsibilities include infrastructure-as-code, Kubernetes and container platforms, CI/CD pipelines, cloud governance, security & compliance, cost optimization, and platform-as-a-product enablement. Ideal candidate has deep AWS/Azure/GCP experience, strong automation skills (Terraform/CloudFormation), observability expertise, and proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives.

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Platform Architect designs and operationalizes enterprise-grade cloud platforms that enable development teams to ship software faster and more securely. This role owns cloud architecture standards, platform blueprints, infrastructure-as-code patterns, CI/CD and GitOps strategy, platform observability and SRE practices, cloud security and compliance controls, and cost governance. The Cloud Platform Architect partners with engineering, security, product, and operations teams to deliver reusable, self-service platform capabilities, lead migrations and proofs-of-concept, and drive continuous improvement of platform reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Cloud Engineer (AWS/Azure/GCP)
  • Senior DevOps Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Solutions Architect or Infrastructure Architect

Advancement To:

  • Head of Cloud Platform / Director of Cloud Architecture
  • VP of Platform Engineering
  • Chief Cloud Architect / Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineering Manager
  • Infrastructure / Network Architect
  • Cloud Security Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end architecture, design and delivery of the enterprise cloud platform (multi-region, multi-account/tenant patterns) including compute, storage, networking, identity, and data services to support mission-critical workloads and microservices at scale.
  • Define and maintain platform architecture standards, reference architectures, reusable blueprints and templates using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) to ensure secure, consistent, and repeatable provisioning across environments.
  • Architect and own the Kubernetes-based container platform (EKS / AKS / GKE) strategy, cluster lifecycle management, scaling, security hardening, network policies, service mesh implementation and automated upgrades to support platform reliability and developer experience.
  • Design and implement enterprise CI/CD and GitOps pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD) that automate build, test, security scanning, and deployment workflows with rollback and canary strategies.
  • Drive the cloud migration strategy and execution for legacy systems to cloud-native architectures, including lift-and-shift prioritization, refactor/replatform assessments, migration runbooks, and migration automation.
  • Own cloud security architecture and controls: IAM and RBAC models, least privilege, secret management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), encryption (KMS), network security (VPC, NSG, firewalls), and security-by-design practices.
  • Establish cloud governance, account/tenant strategy, cost center tagging, budgets, and FinOps practices to optimize cloud costs, monitor spend, and enforce compliance with organizational policies.
  • Build and operate observability and monitoring platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry) for metrics, logs, traces, SLO/SLI definition, alerting, and on-call procedures to meet reliability targets.
  • Create disaster recovery (DR), backup, and business continuity plans for platform services; design cross-region replication, RTO/RPO targets and test failover procedures.
  • Collaborate with security and compliance teams to implement regulatory controls (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI, HIPAA) and support audits with architecture reviews, evidence collection and remediation planning.
  • Drive platform automation for developer self-service: service catalog, templated pipelines, onboarding automation, CLI/SDK toolkits and internal developer portals to reduce toil and accelerate release velocity.
  • Lead proof-of-concepts (POCs) and evaluate emerging cloud-native technologies (serverless, managed databases, edge, data streaming) to inform platform roadmaps and vendor decisions.
  • Define network architecture including hybrid connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute), transit architectures, peering, subnet design, and secure egress/ingress patterns for multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
  • Architect identity and access strategies integrating Azure AD / Google Identity / AWS IAM with SSO, SCIM, and delegated access models for developer and service identities.
  • Implement platform-level backup, retention, and data lifecycle policies for storage, databases and object stores ensuring compliance and efficient cost management.
  • Collaborate with product and engineering leaders to translate business requirements into platform requirements, SLAs and measurable KPIs, and lead cross-functional planning to deliver prioritized platform capabilities.
  • Mentor and coach platform, SRE and DevOps engineers, establish best practices for coding, IaC, testing, and operational playbooks; build a culture of shared responsibility for platform reliability.
  • Manage vendor relationships and commercial negotiations for cloud services, managed Kubernetes offerings, observability and security tooling; evaluate managed services and third-party platforms for fit and ROI.
  • Develop runbooks, incident response playbooks, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve incident handling, reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to restore (MTTR).
  • Drive performance tuning and capacity planning across compute, containers, databases, and network layers, using cost/performance trade-off analyses to right-size resources.
  • Standardize API gateway, ingress, and service routing patterns; design rate-limiting, authentication, and edge security to protect public-facing services and internal APIs.
  • Lead cross-functional workshops and architecture review boards to validate solution designs, capture technical debt, and ensure alignment with platform strategy and enterprise architecture.
  • Translate non-functional requirements (scalability, availability, security, latency) into architecture choices and acceptance criteria and validate through architecture validation and load testing.
  • Champion GitOps and platform-as-a-product mindset: enable teams to consume platform capabilities via APIs, Git-based workflows, and self-service portals with clear SLAs and support boundaries.
  • Ensure successful onboarding of new services to the platform including security reviews, compliance checks, performance baselining, and runbook handover.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Maintain detailed architecture diagrams, component inventories, and platform documentation to support operational maturity and audits.
  • Provide on-call escalation support for platform incidents and lead post-incident corrective action plans.
  • Deliver internal training, brown-bags, and onboarding sessions to raise platform awareness and adoption across engineering teams.
  • Validate vendor proposals, participate in RFPs, and assess commercial terms for managed services and tooling.
  • Build cost and capacity forecasting models to support budget planning and executive reporting.
  • Facilitate cross-team integrations, platform migrations and decommissioning plans to avoid platform sprawl and shadow IT.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep expertise designing and operating cloud platforms in AWS, Azure and/or GCP at enterprise scale (including multi-account strategies, landing zones and organization-level policies).
  • Advanced proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code: Terraform (recommended), CloudFormation, ARM templates and modular, testable IaC patterns.
  • Strong Kubernetes and container orchestration experience (EKS, AKS, GKE), including cluster provisioning, operators, autoscaling, Helm charts, and production-grade upgrades.
  • CI/CD and GitOps tooling experience: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Flux and pipeline automation for secure, testable deployments.
  • Experience implementing observability and monitoring stacks: Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, tracing and SLO/SLI implementations.
  • Cloud security and compliance expertise: IAM, role-based access controls, secrets management, encryption, network segmentation, vulnerability scanning, and audit controls.
  • Networking knowledge for cloud: VPC/VNet design, transit architectures, VPN, Direct Connect/ExpressRoute, routing, NAT, and load balancing.
  • Proficient in scripting and automation: Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell to build tooling, operators and automation for self-service.
  • Experience with serverless platforms and cloud native managed services (Lambda, FaaS, managed databases, cloud storage) and when to apply them.
  • Familiarity with database services and data platforms in cloud: RDS, Aurora, BigQuery, Spanner, Cosmos DB and lifecycle management of cloud data stores.
  • Experience with container security, policy enforcement tools (OPA/Gatekeeper), image scanning, and supply chain security practices.
  • Cost optimization and FinOps skills: tagging strategies, reserved/spot instances, savings plans, automated cost alerts and reporting.
  • Production incident management and SRE practices: runbooks, blameless postmortems, SLIs/SLOs and observability-driven operations.
  • Hands-on experience with API gateways, ingress controllers, service meshes (Istio/Linkerd), and secure service-to-service communication.
  • Familiarity with CI/CD testing frameworks, infrastructure testing, and policy-as-code (Sentinel, OPA) for compliance automation.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinker with the ability to translate business goals into pragmatic cloud platform roadmaps.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication, able to present architecture decisions and trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Strong leadership, influencing and stakeholder-management skills; experience running architecture reviews and cross-team governance.
  • Mentorship and team development: coach engineers, cultivate best practices, and promote knowledge sharing.
  • Problem-solving mindset and data-driven decision making; comfortable with ambiguity and prioritizing competing demands.
  • Collaborative and customer-focused: build trust with product and engineering teams and act as a platform partner.
  • Detail-oriented with a focus on reliability, security and operational excellence.
  • Time management and delivery focus; ability to manage multiple high-impact initiatives concurrently.
  • Resilience and calm under pressure during incidents and escalations.
  • Continuous learner: stays current with cloud trends, security, and platform innovations and incorporates them into roadmaps.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or Business Administration (MBA) with technology focus.
  • Relevant cloud certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Cloud Computing
  • Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 7–12+ years of progressive experience in infrastructure, cloud engineering, platform or systems architecture.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years overall IT experience with at least 3–5 years focused on cloud architecture and platform engineering at scale.
  • Demonstrated experience designing and delivering multi-cloud or large-scale single-cloud platforms, Kubernetes in production, infrastructure-as-code at scale, CI/CD automation, security and compliance programs, and leading cross-functional teams.
  • Track record of delivering platform-as-a-product capabilities, mentoring engineers, and driving cost and reliability improvements across an organization.
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