Title: Cloud Architect
Quick Summary
StratusForge Consulting is hiring a Cloud Architect to design secure, scalable, and cost-aware architectures across AWS, Azure, and GCP. You will lead discovery and design workshops, produce reference architectures and landing zones, guide engineering teams through migration and modernization, and codify best practices with infrastructure as code. The ideal candidate combines hands-on depth with clear stakeholder communication and a pragmatic approach to reliability, security, and spend.
Project Category or Industry
Cloud consulting for enterprise SaaS, data platforms, and regulated services
Type
Full-time employment
Experience Level
Mid-level to senior. Exceptional engineers ready to step into an architect role are welcome and will receive structured mentorship.
Duration
Permanent role
Location
Remote-first across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC with at least 4 hours of overlap between 09:00–18:00 UTC; optional hub days in Chicago and London
Salary
USD 120,000–165,000 base depending on location and experience, plus annual performance bonus and benefits
Payment Mode
Monthly payroll via bank transfer; contractor arrangements available where local employment is not supported
Hiring Company Name
StratusForge Consulting
Required Skills or Tools
Deep knowledge of one or more major clouds, infrastructure as code with Terraform, container orchestration, identity and access management, networking, security controls, CI/CD, observability, and cost management. Strong diagramming and documentation skills and the ability to communicate trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Project Details
Project Description
You will lead client engagements that establish cloud foundations and modernize workloads. Typical work includes multi-account or multi-subscription design, network segmentation, identity strategy, key management, landing zones with guardrails, platform services for compute and data, and the patterns and templates that product teams use to deploy safely. Deliverables emphasize repeatability—reference architectures, IaC modules, and well-maintained runbooks.
Core Responsibilities and Expected Deliverables
Run technical discovery with customers and translate requirements into target architectures.
Produce high-level and low-level designs, threat models, migration roadmaps, and total cost of ownership estimates.
Define and implement landing zones, network topologies, identity boundaries, encryption standards, and backup/DR.
Establish CI/CD standards, environment promotion flows, and golden templates for application teams.
Create Terraform modules and policy guardrails; review pull requests and guide platform enablement work.
Set reliability and security baselines with SLOs, logging, metrics, and tracing; hand over dashboards and runbooks.
Lead design reviews and readiness checks; coach client engineers and present recommendations to executives.
Required Experience and Preferred Qualifications
5+ years in cloud engineering or platform roles, including 2+ years designing production architectures.
Hands-on expertise with VPC/VNet design, private connectivity, service endpoints/PrivateLink, load balancing, and DNS.
Strong understanding of IAM, least privilege, KMS/HSM, encryption at rest and in transit, and secrets management.
Familiarity with compliance and governance in regulated environments (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001).
Nice to have: multi-cloud patterns, data platform design, service mesh, policy as code, and cost allocation/FinOps.
Professional certifications (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Professional Cloud Architect) are valued but not required.
Tools or Platforms to Be Used
AWS: Organizations/Control Tower, IAM Identity Center, VPC, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, Route 53, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, EKS
Azure: Landing zones, VNets/Peering, Entra ID, Private Link, Storage, SQL/Managed Instance, AKS
GCP: Projects/Folders, VPC, Cloud DNS, Cloud KMS, GCS, Cloud SQL/Spanner (as applicable), GKE
IaC & delivery: Terraform/Terragrunt, Helm/Kustomize, GitHub Actions or GitLab CI
Policy & security: Open Policy Agent/Conftest, HashiCorp Vault or cloud KMS, image scanning and signing (e.g., Cosign)
Observability: Cloud provider telemetry, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, log correlation with managed services or Datadog/Splunk
Language Requirement
English is required for daily collaboration; additional languages are a plus.
Communication Style
Asynchronous-first via Slack and GitHub with weekly Zoom ceremonies. Architecture decisions are captured as short RFCs in Notion, and client-facing design packs are delivered as well-structured PDFs with diagrams.
Time Commitment or Working Window
Approximately 40 hours per week with flexible scheduling; occasional short travel for onsite discovery workshops (2–4 times per year) may be requested and planned in advance.
Payment Terms
Monthly salary with annual review and performance bonus. For contractor engagements, milestone-based deliverables with biweekly invoicing and net-15 terms.
Evaluation Criteria
A short architecture exercise (diagram + rationale + risks and mitigations)
Review of Terraform modules or design documents from prior work
Live scenario discussion covering networking, identity, data protection, and cost trade-offs
Communication clarity with stakeholders and mentoring approach
References confirming reliability and delivery quality
Other Requirements
Standard NDA upon offer acceptance, identity verification, and reference checks compliant with local laws. Adherence to secure development lifecycle, change management, and documentation standards.
About the Company
StratusForge Consulting is a remote-first cloud architecture firm that helps software companies and enterprises ship safely at scale. Founded in 2016, we combine principled design with hands-on delivery to build platforms that balance speed, reliability, security, and cost. Our teams operate across North America and Europe, partnering long-term with clients to modernize and govern their cloud estates. Learn more at https://stratusforge.consulting or contact careers@stratusforge.consulting.