AWS Resident Architect - Senior Cloud Solutions Architect

Strategic Communications•Harrisburg, PA

About The Position

Strategic is seeking a Senior AWS Solutions Architect to serve as a Resident Architect for enterprise and public sector customer engagements. The role is a strategic cloud advisory position focused on architectural governance, platform maturity, and adoption enablement—not direct implementation or workload delivery. The Resident Architect provides ongoing architectural advice, governance, and optimization after cloud implementation projects, helping customers sustain AWS adoption while aligning architectures with AWS best practices, operational maturity goals, and regulatory requirements. The Resident Architect works with customer engineering teams, AWS account teams, and Strategic’s Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to advance cloud platform maturity, modernization, and operational readiness. The role supports architectural validation and adoption of AWS architectures developed during major transformation programs. Engagements typically provide monthly architectural capacity and may include architecture reviews, platform engineering advisory, governance and compliance alignment, migration advice, and AWS service adoption guidance. The position may be remote, hybrid, or at a customer site in the U.S. Candidates near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania are preferred and should be willing to work onsite approximately two days per week on average. Travel depends on customer engagements and may range from fully remote to periodic onsite work; typical expectations are 25–100%, with occasional higher travel during key milestones. The role is full-time. The work is primarily performed in an office environment and includes regular sitting and computer/tool use, with occasional standing and walking. Candidates must be U.S. citizens and possess or be capable of obtaining a security clearance; the ability to obtain Public Sector clearance is preferred.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification.
8+ years of cloud architecture experience.
5+ years designing and deploying AWS architectures.
Experience supporting regulated or public-sector cloud environments, such as FedRAMP, CJIS, HIPAA, NIST-framework, or GovCloud environments.
Proven experience in AWS networking architecture, identity and access management, multi-account governance, infrastructure-as-code automation, and cloud security architecture.
Experience supporting environments involving AWS Organizations, landing zone frameworks, DevSecOps pipelines, hybrid architectures, and cloud migrations and modernization programs.
Technical skills in VPC networking architecture; IAM and security architecture; EC2, EKS, and ECS; S3 and storage architectures; RDS, Aurora, and data platforms; CloudWatch and observability; and AWS Config and Security Hub.
Platform and DevOps skills including Terraform or CloudFormation, CI/CD platforms, EKS or Kubernetes container orchestration, and GitOps workflows.
Knowledge of encryption architectures, network segmentation, logging and audit frameworks, and regulatory cloud environments.
Executive-level communication skills, ability to influence architecture decisions, a customer advisory mindset, strong technical documentation ability, and ability to translate business outcomes into architecture strategies.
Must be a U.S. citizen and possess or be capable of obtaining a security clearance.
Must complete a background check and drug testing.

Nice To Haves

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional certification.
AWS DevOps Engineer Professional certification.
AWS Security Specialty certification.
Kubernetes certifications such as CKA or CKAD.
FinOps Practitioner certification.
Public Sector or SLED cloud program experience.
AWS Professional Services engagement support experience.
FedRAMP or GovCloud environment experience.
AI/ML and data platform architecture experience.
Amazon Connect or digital service architecture experience.
Large-scale migration program experience.
Ability to obtain Public Sector clearance is preferred.

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary cloud architecture advisor for assigned customer environments.
Validate evolving architectures against the AWS Well-Architected Framework, identify architectural drift, and recommend remediation strategies.
Develop and maintain current-state and target-state architecture diagrams, and support architecture governance and design decision documentation.
Advise on Infrastructure-as-Code, CI/CD pipeline architectures, containerization strategies, landing zone design, and multi-account governance.
Recommend automation strategies to improve operational efficiency and reliability.
Conduct Well-Architected Reviews and operational readiness assessments.
Support improvements to observability, monitoring, logging, and incident response, and help teams improve workload reliability, scalability, and performance.
Identify cost optimization opportunities and support FinOps alignment.
Advise on rehost, replatform, refactor, replace, and retire migration strategies, and support phased modernization roadmaps aligned with business objectives.
Provide architectural guidance aligned with FedRAMP, CJIS, HIPAA, FERPA, and NIST frameworks; support DevSecOps integration and IAM best practices; and guide secure architecture patterns involving encryption, network segmentation, and logging.
Mentor engineering teams on AWS architecture best practices and conduct architecture workshops and technical briefings.
Support backlog prioritization for cloud improvements and adoption initiatives.
Coordinate with AWS account teams, AWS TAMs, Strategic delivery leadership, and customer engineering leadership.
Provide monthly and quarterly architecture reviews and reporting.
Support architecture reviews, platform engineering advisory, governance and compliance alignment, migration advisory, and AWS service adoption guidance.