Solutions Architect (AWS)

Role Title: AWS Solution Architect

Role Purpose

This role sits within a newly established Enterprise Architecture function, supporting a multi-year transformation programme. The AWS Solution Architect is responsible for shaping and governing the cloud architecture strategy, ensuring that platforms are secure, scalable, cost-effective, and aligned with AWS best practices.

You will collaborate closely with product, engineering, and infrastructure teams to assess current-state risks, define future-state patterns, and guide delivery teams toward well-architected solutions.

• Strategic: Define cloud roadmaps, standards, and reference architectures to future-proof the organisation's AWS estate.
• Operational: Build trusted relationships across teams to translate strategy into tangible outcomes.
• Leadership: Act as a subject-matter expert and mentor within the wider technology community.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the cloud architecture pillar of the technology strategy, driving adoption of infrastructure-as-code and embedding the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
• Maintain high-level architecture views and model the current AWS footprint, including dependencies and technical debt.
• Facilitate design forums, present architectural options, and make decisions balancing risk, cost, and delivery speed.
• Define target and transitional states for key cloud components such as landing zones, network segmentation, identity, observability, and disaster recovery.
• Produce or review detailed designs for projects involving container platforms (EKS/Fargate), serverless workloads, analytics, and media streaming pipelines.
• Promote automation through IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Ansible) and GitOps pipelines (CodePipeline, GitHub Actions).
• Embed security and resilience using AWS organisational controls, IAM best practices, encryption, and multi-region architecture patterns.
• Drive cost optimisation through reserved instance planning, right-sizing, and architectural efficiency.
• Champion cloud best practices via Well-Architected Reviews, knowledge-sharing sessions, and mentoring.
• Evaluate emerging AWS services and recommend adoption where beneficial.

Required Experience & Qualifications

Essential:

• Proven experience in cloud/infrastructure architecture with hands-on AWS expertise
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional and AWS Certified Security
• Deep knowledge of core AWS services (e.g., VPC, EC2, EKS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, KMS, Control Tower)
• Strong understanding of hybrid networking and security (Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN, WAF, Zero Trust)
• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and CI/CD practices
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills

Desirable:

• Experience in media or content delivery environments
• Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKAD)
• Experience with large-scale data or streaming platforms on AWS
• Familiarity with CloudHealth or similar cost management tools
• AWS DevOps Engineer - Professional certification
• ISC CISSP or CCSP certification