Principal Consultant

Principal Cloud Architect (AWS) - Outside IR35

12 months+, Fully Remote (UK only)

The Role

Our client is looking for a Principal-level architect with a strong consultancy background and deep financial services experience to provide technical leadership and architectural oversight across a complex AWS estate.

You will act as the senior technical authority across multiple workstreams, ensuring architectural integrity, quality, and alignment to agreed standards.

You will:

• Provide technical authority and oversight across delivery, ensuring solutions align with agreed architecture, standards, and best practice
• Validate key technical decisions, designs, and outputs, holding accountability for quality and fitness-for-purpose
• Guide teams through complex or high-risk areas, offering direction and constructive challenge to de-risk outcomes
• Ensure consistency and reuse across the organisation, avoiding fragmentation and reinforcing standard approaches
• Act as an escalation point for technical risks, issues, and trade-offs, supporting informed decision-making
• Balance pragmatism with engineering rigour, ensuring solutions are both deliverable and sustainable
• Work closely with delivery leads and senior customer stakeholders to maintain confidence in the technical direction and overall integrity of the solution

Required Experience & Skills

AWS & Cloud Architecture (Essential)

• Deep knowledge of AWS Cloud and enterprise-scale architecture
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (mandatory)
• Strong experience designing hybrid and multi-account AWS architectures
• Proven experience architecting within the financial services sector, with strong understanding of security, legal, regulatory and compliance considerations

Strong service knowledge across:

• EC2
• Load Balancing
• Networking (VPCs, VPC Lattice preferred)
• WAF
• IAM
• RDS and Aurora
• AppStream 2.0 / Amazon WorkSpaces
• EFS
• S3
• Lambda
• DMS
• AWS Security Tooling (e.g. Config)
• SSM
• CloudWatch
• CloudTrail

Desirable service knowledge:

• EKS, ECS
• API Gateway
• Direct Connect
• SQS, SNS, SES
• Route 53
• Secrets Manager
• AWS migration tooling

Infrastructure as Code & Engineering Governance (Essential)

• Deep expertise in Terraform / OpenTofu and Terragrunt
• Strong background operating within Agile delivery environments
• Experience leading and guiding engineers within Agile programmes
• Proven ability to design and present High-Level Designs (HLDs) and Low-Level Designs (LLDs) for formal sign-off

Desirable Experience

• Azure DevOps
• Oracle and PostgreSQL migrations into AWS
• Draw.io (or equivalent architecture tooling)

Profile Sought

• Principal-level architect with consultancy pedigree
• Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills
• Comfortable providing challenge at senior levels while maintaining trust
• Experienced operating as the accountable technical authority across complex programmes
• Able to combine strategic thinking with practical delivery awareness

This opportunity would suit a seasoned AWS Principal Architect looking for a long-term, outside IR35 engagement where they can provide strategic technical leadership within a regulated financial services environment. Apply now online - this is an urgent role requiring an immediate starter.