Cloud Architect

Department: IT Department

FLSA Status: Exempt

Exemption: Computer/Administrative

Job Type: Regular

Work Schedule:

M-F 8:00-5:00

Job Status: Full Time

Reports To: TBD

Amount of Travel Required: Occasional

Positions Supervised: None

POSITION SUMMARY

The Cloud Architect is an individual contributor and technical lead who designs, secures, and governs the organization's cloud and hybrid environments. This position translates business requirements into scalable, resilient, and cost-effective architectures, sets cloud standards, and leads migration and modernization projects. The role is expected to understand both the business and technology requirements of the company and industry.

This position has no supervisory responsibility. Performance is measured by the reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness of the architectures delivered and by the degree to which designs are converted into reusable standards, reference architectures, and documentation that the broader IT organization can apply elsewhere. The incumbent works under the direction of the assigned reporting manager and coordinates with infrastructure, security, and application teams to ensure all delivered work meets company standards before it reaches production.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS

Reasonable Accommodations Statement

To accomplish this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform, with or without reasonable accommodation, each essential function satisfactorily. Reasonable accommodations may be made to help enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Essential Functions Statement(s)

• Define and maintain the cloud architecture and standards, including reference architectures and reusable design patterns for compute, storage, networking, identity, and security.
• Design cloud and hybrid solutions that meet application requirements for availability, performance, scalability, and security.
• Evaluate cloud services and recommend solutions that balance cost, performance, security, and supportability.
• Design identity and access management, network segmentation, encryption, and secrets management aligned to applicable compliance frameworks (i.e. SOC 2, PCI-DSS, privacy regulations).
• Define governance, tagging, and access-control policies, and review designs from other teams for adherence to standards.
• Monitor cloud spend and usage, and recommend right-sizing, reserved capacity, and automation to reduce cost without sacrificing reliability.
• Lead cloud migration and modernization efforts, including assessing existing workloads, selecting the migration approach (rehost, replatform, refactor), and designing the target architecture.
• Establish infrastructure-as-code standards (i.e. Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation) and integrate them with CI/CD pipelines in partnership with DevOps and application teams.
• Design backup, disaster recovery, and high-availability architectures with defined recovery time and recovery point objectives.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, networking, development, and business teams to ensure solutions satisfy identity, access, data protection, retention, and change management requirements prior to deployment.
• Deploy through established change management practices, including validation in a non-production environment, documented rollback plans, and confirmation of post-deployment state.
• Manage relationships and technical evaluations with cloud providers and vendors.
• Produce and maintain architecture diagrams, decision records, runbooks, and technical documentation for all environments owned.
• Serve as an escalation point for complex cloud and infrastructure issues and drive root-cause resolution.
• Mentor engineers, present proposals and tradeoffs to leadership, and track emerging cloud services and best practices.
• Communicate progress, tradeoffs, limitations, and risks clearly to both technical staff and non-technical business stakeholders.
• Operate within the company’s data classification standards, information security requirements, and applicable regulatory and audit obligations.
• Escalate to the assigned reporting manager when a request exceeds approved scope, introduces unmanaged risk, or requires investment or vendor engagement.
• Travel occasionally to company locations and events to support projects and deployments.
• Other duties as assigned.

Additional Essential Functions

Attendance/Punctuality Is consistently at work and on time; Ensures work responsibilities are covered when absent; Arrives at meeting and appointments on time.

POSITION QUALIFICATIONS

Competency Statement(s)

PrimeSource Company Competencies

Below are the Core Competencies of PrimeSource Building Products Inc. These competencies make our company who we are today.

• Customer Focus - Is dedicated to meeting the expectations and requirements of internal and external customers; gets first-hand customer information and uses it for improvements in products and services; acts with customers in mind; establishes and maintains effective relationships with customers and gains their trust and respect.
• Action Oriented - Enjoys working hard; is action oriented and full of energy for the things he/she sees as challenging; not fearful of acting with a minimum of planning; seizes more opportunities than others.
• Ethics & Values - Adheres to an appropriate (for the setting) and effective set of core values and beliefs during both good and bad times; acts in line with those values; rewards the right values and disapproves of others; practices what he/she preaches.
• Integrity & Trust - Is widely trusted; is seen as a direct, truthful individual; can present the unvarnished truth in an appropriate and helpful manner; keeps confidences; admits mistakes; doesn't misrepresent him/herself for personal gain.
• Problem Solving - Uses rigorous logic and methods to solve difficult problems with effective solutions; probes all fruitful sources for answers; can see hidden problems; is excellent at honest analysis; looks beyond the obvious and doesn't stop at the first answers.
• Time Management - Uses his/her time effectively and efficiently; values time; concentrates his/her efforts on the more important priorities; gets more done in less time than others; can attend to a broader range of activities.

Job Specific Competencies

To perform the job successfully, an individual should demonstrate the following competencies:

• Business Acumen - Knows how businesses work; understands how the organization's operations, systems, and data connect; can translate a business need into a technical solution that produces measurable benefit.
• Dealing with Ambiguity - Can effectively cope with change; can shift gears comfortably; can decide and act without having the total picture; can comfortably handle risk and uncertainty in loosely defined problems.
• Decision Quality - Makes good decisions based upon a mixture of analysis, wisdom, experience, and judgment; most solutions and suggestions turn out to be correct and accurate over time.
• Functional/Technical Skills - Has the functional and technical knowledge and skills to do the job at a high level of accomplishment; designs, builds, and supports cloud architectures that hold up in a production environment.
• Informing - Provides the information people need to know to do their jobs and to use what has been delivered; is timely and transparent about status, limitations, and known issues.
• Interpersonal Savvy - Relates well to all kinds of people, up, down, and sideways, inside and outside the organization; builds appropriate rapport and constructive working relationships.
• Learning on the Fly - Learns quickly when facing new problems; is a relentless and versatile learner; analyzes both successes and failures for clues to improvement; experiments to find workable solutions.
• Listening - Practices attentive and active listening; has the patience to hear people out; can accurately restate the needs and constraints of stakeholders before proposing a solution.
• Planning - Accurately scopes out length and difficulty of tasks and projects; sets objectives and goals; breaks down work into process steps; develops schedules and assignments; anticipates and adjusts for problems and roadblocks; measures performance against goals; evaluates results.
• Priority Setting - Spends his/her time and the time of others on what is important; quickly zeros in on the critical few; senses what will help or hinder accomplishing a goal; eliminates roadblocks and creates focus.
• Process Management - Good at figuring out the processes necessary to get things done; understands how to separate and combine tasks into efficient work flow; can simplify complex processes and get more out of fewer resources.
• Self-Development - Is personally committed to and actively works to continuously improve him/herself; seeks feedback; keeps current with a rapidly changing technical landscape.

SKILLS & ABILITIES

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or other IT related field from an accredited four-year college or university, or an equivalent combination of education and demonstrated technical experience.

Other Requirements:

To perform this job successfully, an individual should have:

•      Typically 5 or more years of IT infrastructure experience, including 3 or more years designing and running cloud environments.

•      Deep expertise in at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and working knowledge of a second.

•      Strong grounding in networking (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, VPN, firewalls) and in identity and security architecture.

•      Hands-on infrastructure-as-code and scripting experience, such as Terraform, PowerShell, Python, or a comparable language.

•      Proven experience migrating applications and data to the cloud and managing cloud environments.

•      Working knowledge of enterprise identity, access, and data protection concepts sufficient to design solutions that pass internal security review.

•      Experience with source control, documented change management, and technical documentation practices.

•      Demonstrated ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders to define requirements, set expectations, and explain tradeoffs.

•      Ability to manage multiple concurrent projects with limited supervision and to communicate status without prompting.

Technologies:

Experience with the following technologies is a plus:

•      Public cloud platforms (i.e. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc.)

•      Infrastructure-as-code (i.e. Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, etc.)

•      Scripting and programming languages (i.e. PowerShell, Python, etc.)

•      Identity platforms (i.e. Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory, etc.)

•      Containers and orchestration (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, etc.)

•      Source control and pipeline tooling (i.e. Git, GitHub, Azure DevOps, etc.)

•      Cloud monitoring, logging, and cost management tools (i.e. Azure Monitor, CloudWatch, FinOps tooling, etc.)

•      Professional cloud architect certifications (i.e. AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Professional Cloud Architect, etc.)

•      Current Windows OS (both workstation and server versions) and Linux

PHYSICAL DEMANDS

N (Not Applicable)

Activity is not applicable to this position.

O (Occasionally)

Position requires this activity up to 33% of the time (0 - 2.5+ hrs/day)

F (Frequently)

Position requires this activity from 33% - 66% of the time (2.5 - 5.5+ hrs/day)

C (Constantly)

Position requires this activity more than 66% of the time (5.5+ hrs/day)

Physical Demands

Lift/Carry

Stand

F

10 lbs or less

N

Walk

F

11-20 lbs

N

Sit

C

21-50 lbs

N

Manually Manipulate

N

51-100 lbs

N

Grasp

N

Over 100 lbs

N

Reach Outward

N

Reach Above Shoulder

N

Push/Pull

Speak

C

12 lbs or less

N

Climb

N

13-25 lbs

N

Crawl

N

26-40 lbs

N

Squat or Kneel

N

41-100 lbs

N