{"id":2148869,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cognizant-principal-cloud-platform-architect-onsite","title":"Principal Cloud Platform Architect - Onsite","company":{"id":85,"name":"Cognizant","domain":"cognizant.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cognizant","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"services","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Cognizant Careers","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":90,"open_postings":146,"ghost_share":0.014,"stale_share":0.562,"repost_share":0.034,"time_to_fill_p50_days":21,"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Lake Forest, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":86000,"max_usd":176000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":565},"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":false},{"name":"ArgoCD","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Azure AKS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure DevOps","optional":false},{"name":"Bicep","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":false},{"name":"GitOps","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Service Mesh","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"FinOps","optional":true},{"name":"Istio","optional":true},{"name":"Linkerd","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-23T09:59:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-09","last_verified_at":"2026-10-27T14:11:51Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":34,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":34},"description":"*Please note, this role is not able to offer visa transfer or sponsorship now or in the future*\nAbout Us:\nCognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies, transforming clients' business, operating, and technology models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses. Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant, a member of the NASDAQ-100, is ranked 195 on the Fortune 500 and is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world. Learn how Cognizant helps clients lead with digital at www.cognizant.com.\nAbout Cognizant’s IoT Practice:\nIntelligent, IoT-enabled products will soon result in the proliferation of data and disrupt virtually all industries. To be successful, both large and small companies must leverage IoT capabilities by designing modern products that fundamentally connect people with processes. Within Cognizant IOT, we engineer industry-aligned, IoT-enabled products that merge industry needs with human drivers. Our intelligent products will revolutionize experiences and result in exciting, transformative outcomes. Without human-centered thinking, connected products are just standalone things-but with it, our modern connected products facilitate a unified way of life enjoyed by all.\nPrincipal Cloud Platform Architect\nPosition Summary\nWe are seeking a highly experienced Principal Cloud Platform Architect to drive the operational maturity and scalability of our CONNECT Platform. This is a strategic, hands-on role focused on improving platform reliability, performance, scalability, resiliency, and cloud cost efficiency across Azure and AWS environments.\nYou will partner closely with Architecture, COE, Engineering, Testing, and Operations teams to identify systemic challenges, validate architectural solutions, and establish best practices for operating large-scale cloud-native platforms. This role emphasizes technical leadership through influence, innovation, and collaboration rather than direct authority.\nKey Responsibilities\nPlatform Architecture & Innovation\nResearch, define, and validate cloud-native architectural patterns that improve scalability, reliability, availability, and operational efficiency.\nDrive platform modernization initiatives across Kubernetes-based environments.\nEvaluate emerging technologies and recommend strategic platform improvements.\nKubernetes & Cloud Optimization\nDesign and optimize large-scale deployments on Azure AKS and AWS EKS.\nDevelop advanced workload scheduling, auto-scaling, and resource optimization strategies.\nImprove multi-tenant platform architectures and operational efficiency.\nEnsure optimal utilization of compute, storage, and networking resources.\nReliability, Availability & Resilience\nArchitect highly available and fault-tolerant systems.\nDefine disaster recovery and resiliency strategies for cloud-native applications.\nEstablish reliability engineering practices to proactively prevent production issues.\nImprove platform observability through logging, metrics, tracing, and monitoring frameworks.\nPerformance & Cost Management\nDrive cloud cost optimization initiatives without compromising system performance.\nAnalyze infrastructure consumption patterns and develop scalable cost-control models.\nIdentify platform bottlenecks and recommend architectural improvements.\nSystem Validation & Testing\nPartner with validation and system test teams to design large-scale performance and resiliency test scenarios.\nSimulate real-world customer workloads and production-scale environments.\nValidate interactions between distributed system components under stress conditions.\nTechnical Leadership\nLead proof-of-concept initiatives and architectural prototypes.\nMentor engineering teams on cloud-native and platform engineering best practices.\nPromote adoption of modern operational and automation practices across teams.\nRequired Qualifications\n12+ years of overall software/cloud engineering experience.\n5+ years of hands-on Kubernetes architecture and administration experience.\nDeep expertise in Kubernetes internals, including:Control Plane\nScheduling\nNetworking\nService Mesh\nNetwork Policies\nResource Management\nSecurity\n\nCloud Platforms\nExpert-level experience with:Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)\nAmazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)\nAzure Cloud Services\nAWS Cloud Services\n\nInfrastructure Automation\nStrong experience with:Terraform\nBicep\nInfrastructure as Code (IaC)\nConfiguration Automation\n\nCI/CD & GitOps\nExperience implementing:GitOps practices\nArgoCD\nGitHub Actions\nAzure DevOps\nModern CI/CD pipelines\n\nObservability\nStrong knowledge of:Prometheus\nGrafana\nOpenTelemetry\nAzure Monitor\nLogging, Monitoring, and Distributed Tracing\n\nDistributed Systems\nDeep understanding of:Large-scale distributed architectures\nHigh Availability (HA)\nFault Tolerance\nScalability Patterns\nMulti-Tenancy\nPerformance Engineering\n\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.\nExperience operating SaaS platforms at scale.\nKnowledge of FinOps and cloud cost optimization frameworks.\nExperience with service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd.\nStrong background in platform engineering and cloud-native ecosystem tools.\nCompensation: - $130,000 to $160,000 + 10% Target Bonus + Full benefits. Application will be accepted by 10/25/2026\nBenefits: Cognizant offers the following benefits for this position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements:\nMedical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance\nPaid holidays plus Paid Time Off\n401(k) plan and contributions\nLong-term/Short-term Disability\nPaid Parental Leave\nEmployee Stock Purchase Plan","description_format":"text","description_chars":5702,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Life insurance","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Science & Engineering","IT Outsourcing & Dedicated Teams","Engineering Services","Cloud Consulting & Migration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-09T05:00:47Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":24,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.522,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":33,"expected_fill_days":21,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cognizant-principal-cloud-platform-architect-onsite","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cognizant-principal-cloud-platform-architect-onsite.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-27T14:19:34Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2796,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-28T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":85},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=85"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcognizant-principal-cloud-platform-architect-onsite"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcognizant-principal-cloud-platform-architect-onsite"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcognizant-principal-cloud-platform-architect-onsite"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cognizant-principal-cloud-platform-architect-onsite\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcognizant-principal-cloud-platform-architect-onsite"}]}