Principal AWS Cloud Architect
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 12, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 7, 2026. Megazone Cloud scores A on the Alion truth index.
About the Role
The Principal AWS Cloud Architect is a lead-level technical role on our cloud engagements. You'll own the technical direction of a workstream or engagement end to end, working with the customer's technical teams to set strategy and drive it to a documented, agreed target state.
This is a leadership role that stays hands-on. You'll lead and mentor a blended onshore/offshore delivery team. When the project calls for it, you'll roll up your sleeves and build: designing landing zones, running migration waves, and writing and reviewing IaC yourself. You're equally comfortable leading a team of engineers or working independently as the sole architect on a project.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Strategy
Own the technical strategy for the engagement and drive it to a documented, agreed target state.
Act as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's technical leadership on architecture, sequencing, and risk; drive discussions to decisions rather than leaving them open.
Recommend best-fit approaches prescriptively and with conviction, backed by delivery experience. Say so clearly when the customer's preferred path is the wrong one.
Make and document consequential architecture decisions, including trade-offs considered and those deliberately deferred.
Set the engineering standard by example: review designs, code, and IaC personally.
Hands-On Delivery
Work independently as the sole architect on smaller or early-phase engagements, owning design and build without a supporting team.
Step in hands-on when the project needs it to:
build foundational environments
execute migration waves
troubleshoot replication and cutover issues
write Terraform/CDK
Lead remediation personally when a workstream needs stabilization.
Team Leadership & Offshore Coordination
Lead and coordinate offshore engineering teams across time zones: assign and sequence work, set clear acceptance criteria, and run effective handoffs so progress continues around the clock.
Review offshore deliverables (designs, IaC, runbooks, migration plans) for quality and consistency before they reach the customer.
Mentor consultants and engineers to raise their technical depth, delivery discipline, and customer-facing skill. Unblock them quickly and help them grow into more senior roles.
Partner with the Engagement Manager and customer to build an achievable project plan with realistic milestones and dependencies.
Confirm the team has the right skill mix and capacity; escalate gaps early.
Coordinate technical execution alongside partner consultants and other vendor teams in an Agile delivery model.
Contribute to the development and refinement of new delivery offerings, reusable assets, and best practices.
Foundational Architecture
Design and deploy AWS foundational environments using Control Tower and Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA).
Define and implement multi-account strategy, covering:
AWS Organizations and OU structure
account vending
SCPs
centralized logging and security tooling
Implement IAM and Identity Center, guardrails, and security baselines across the account structure.
Migration Execution
Lead discovery and assessment of on-premises estates: application dependency mapping, right-sizing analysis, and migration wave planning.
Determine the right migration strategy per workload (rehost or replatform), balancing speed, risk, and long-term operating cost.
Lead lift-and-shift replication of physical and VMware-based servers into EC2 using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), including image conversion and OS/driver remediation.
Direct replatforming onto managed AWS services: self-managed databases to RDS, load balancers to ALB/NLB, static content to CloudFront.
Own hybrid connectivity design: Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, Transit Gateway, DNS, and Active Directory integration.
Oversee storage and database migrations (DMS, DataSync, Storage Gateway, Snow Family) and validate data integrity.
Set standards for IaC (Terraform, AWS CDK), pipeline automation, and operational readiness before workloads reach production.
Produce and review design documents, migration runbooks, diagrams, decision records, and hand-over guides.
Qualifications
15+ years designing and operating infrastructure, including 5+ years in a lead or principal architect role on customer-facing engagements.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or similar.
Demonstrated hands-on AWS depth. You have personally built production systems, not only managed teams that built them, and can still do so today.
Proven ability to work independently as the sole architect on a project, from design through delivery.
Experience leading and mentoring offshore or distributed engineering teams, including delegating work, reviewing quality, and coordinating across time zones.
Experience setting technical strategy for an engagement and coordinating with customer technical leadership.
Hands-on experience building AWS foundational environments: Control Tower, Landing Zone Accelerator, AWS Organizations, and multi-account architecture.
Demonstrated experience with large-scale, multi-wave cloud migrations.
Practical experience executing rehost and replatform migrations, and the judgment to recommend the right approach per workload.
Hands-on experience with AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), AWS Migration Hub, and VM Import/Export.
Strong AWS networking fundamentals: VPC design, routing, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect/VPN, and DNS.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and AWS CDK) and at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or PowerShell).
Current ability to review code and IaC, not just architecture diagrams.
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present to both customer executives and engineering teams.
Active AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional certification required . An additional AWS Specialty certification (e.g., Security, Advanced Networking, or Machine Learning) is a plus.
Experience with AWS Transform (including AWS Transform for VMware) is a significant plus.
Why You'll Love It Here
Our Product is Our People: We live by this. We invest in people who invest in themselves. Your growth is our growth.
True Servant Leadership: Our CTO leads with a "force multiplier" philosophy. Management is here to empower you and clear roadblocks, not to micromanage. We won't ask you to do anything we're not willing to do ourselves.
Flat Organization, Real Impact: Your voice and designs will directly shape our technical roadmap and our clients' success. You'll work on the latest tech to solve real problems.
A "Learn-from-it" Culture: We're moving fast and building new things. We believe mistakes are learning opportunities, not failures.
We seek diverse talent who are ready to make an immediate impact. We believe that innovation thrives when teams are built with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you are excited by this mission, we encourage you to apply, even if your experience doesn't perfectly match every qualification listed.
Megazone Cloud is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participates in E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of all new hires.