Principal Architect, Cloud and Platform Engineering

Principal Architect, Cloud and Platform Engineering:

The Principal Cloud Architect provides senior technical leadership for enterprise cloud architecture and governance within Stryker’s Cloud Center of Excellence. The role develops reference architectures, reusable patterns, technical standards, and practical governance requirements that enable secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective cloud adoption across Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and other approved cloud platforms.

This individual contributor partners with Cloud and Platform Engineering, Cybersecurity, Network, Identity, Cloud Operations, FinOps, and application teams to assess architectural and governance gaps, guide solution designs, and translate enterprise requirements into implementable controls and engineering capabilities. The role leads technical reviews, maintains architecture and governance guidance, and contributes to the enterprise cloud roadmap through technical expertise, consultation, and influence.

What You Will Do:

• Shape enterprise cloud architecture by defining and evolving reference architectures, design principles, and reusable patterns across landing zones, networking, identity, security, resilience, observability, data protection, and application modernization.

• Provide technical direction and architectural governance by leading architecture reviews, guiding teams toward approved cloud services and patterns, and driving clear decisions on trade-offs, risks, exceptions, and emerging cloud capabilities.

• Strengthen cloud standards and governance by identifying gaps in existing policies and controls and translating them into clear, actionable standards, ownership models, evidence requirements, and exception pathways.

• Turn architecture into scalable engineering capabilities by translating requirements into technical specifications and acceptance criteria for Terraform modules, policy as code, provisioning workflows, shared services, landing zones, and golden paths.

• Enable secure, developer-friendly cloud adoption by partnering with Cloud and Platform Engineering to embed security, identity, networking, tagging, cost, and operational controls into reusable platforms and self-service provisioning experiences.

• Drive cloud risk, compliance, and cost discipline by partnering with Cybersecurity, Risk, and FinOps teams to align cloud standards with enterprise controls, assess exceptions and control gaps, prioritize remediation, and incorporate cost and consumption guardrails into cloud designs.

• Influence and align cross-functional stakeholders by facilitating working sessions across Security, Risk, Network, Operations, Engineering, and Platform teams to resolve complex architecture and governance challenges and establish clear decisions and accountability.

• Elevate cloud maturity and technical capability by mentoring architects and engineers, promoting adoption of approved patterns, and using architecture reviews, stakeholder feedback, control coverage, exception trends, standards adoption, and platform maturity insights to continuously improve the cloud ecosystem.

What You Need:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field, or equivalent relevant professional experience; a Master’s or PhD and advanced certifications such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS Solutions Architect, TOGAF, or equivalent are preferred.

• 12-15 years of progressive experience in enterprise technology, cloud architecture, infrastructure, network, or platform engineering, with significant responsibility for complex cloud designs, architecture decisions, and technical standards.

• Deep expertise in Azure and/or AWS and multi-cloud architecture, with proven experience designing enterprise cloud foundations, landing zones, workload architectures, and reusable architectural patterns.

• Strong cloud networking architecture expertise, including hub-and-spoke and transit designs, VNet/VPC segmentation, routing, DNS, private connectivity, ingress/egress, firewalls, load balancing, hybrid connectivity, and integration with enterprise network services.

• Strong hands-on Infrastructure as Code expertise, with Terraform/HCL required and central to the role, complemented by experience with PowerShell, Python, Bash/shell scripting, YAML/JSON, Git, and CI/CD tooling such as GitHub/GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps.

• Proven expertise in automated guardrails and policy as code, translating architecture, security, networking, and compliance requirements into enforceable controls using HashiCorp Sentinel and/or OPA/Rego, Azure Policy, AWS Organizations/SCPs, AWS Config, security/IaC scanning, and other cloud-native governance capabilities.

• Strong cloud governance, security, and modernization knowledge, spanning identity, resilience, observability, data protection, DevSecOps, Kubernetes, cloud-native PaaS, application modernization, data/AI architectures, control mapping, exception management, compliance evidence, and FinOps practices.

• Exceptional technical communication and stakeholder influence skills, with experience developing reference architectures, conducting architecture reviews, assessing risks and trade-offs, producing high-quality technical guidance, and driving alignment across engineering, security, network, risk, and business stakeholders in complex, ideally global and regulated environments.