Cloud Architect, Staff

Qualcomm • San Diego, CA

11d • $129,600 - $194,400 • Onsite

About The Position

Qualcomm IT is seeking a Staff Cloud Architect to design, build, and govern the GitOps release process, CI/CD automation, and developer tooling for an internal developer platform built on EKS. As part of the broader Cloud Team, this hands-on, high-autonomy role shapes how platform changes are built, versioned, promoted, and released, and helps establish predictable delivery practices. The architect defines technical standards independently and drives adoption across teams without direct authority.

The role is full-time and onsite in San Diego, California, five days per week. On-call participation is required, including potential 24/7 coverage. The position is not eligible for Qualcomm immigration sponsorship.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of IT-related experience with a bachelor's degree in computer science, Applied Mathematics, or Engineering, or at least 10 years of IT-related experience without a degree; demonstrated progression from technical execution to team-level technical leadership.
• At least 3 years operating Kubernetes in production, including hands-on EKS cluster lifecycle and multi-environment operations.
• Proven experience designing and governing GitOps release processes, including branching strategies, multi-environment promotion, and release versioning/tagging.
• Advanced CI/CD expertise using GitHub Actions or similar, building pipelines that integrate building, linting, testing, DevSecOps, and Argo CD.
• Strong Terraform expertise, including module development, state management, and multi-environment patterns.
• Strong AWS expertise across networking, IAM, and the EKS ecosystem.
• Track record of driving technical standards and adoption across teams without direct authority.
• Strong Linux and distributed-systems troubleshooting skills across Kubernetes, networking, and AWS.
• Experience with Helm/Kustomize, Kubernetes networking fundamentals, and Cilium.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills for engineering and leadership audiences.
• Platform product thinking, treating developer experience as a product with measurable outcomes.
• Ability to participate in on-call coverage, including potential 24/7 coverage.

Nice To Haves

• Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, or CKS) and/or AWS DevOps Engineer Professional or Solutions Architect certification.
• Experience leading agile/Scrum delivery for an engineering team as Scrum Master or equivalent; Scrum certification (CSM/PSM) is a plus.
• Experience with gitStream or similar repository automation and automated release/versioning tools such as semantic versioning, release-please, or semantic-release.
• Experience with Karpenter, Kyverno policy-as-code, and Crossplane concepts.
• Demonstrated success building self-service “paved road” platform capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and govern the platform GitOps release process using Argo CD, including multi-environment promotion workflows, deployment guardrails, and release documentation; set standards and drive adoption across platform and application teams.
• Own platform infrastructure CI/CD workflow definitions and implementation using GitHub Actions, integrating builds, linting, testing, DevSecOps scanning, and Argo CD delivery; reduce release lead time and manual toil.
• Define and maintain platform branching strategy and version-tagging scheme; automate repository and pull-request workflows using gitStream.
• Build self-service platform templates, tooling, and documentation to improve developer experience; gather user feedback and measure adoption.
• Help drive agile delivery practices, including sprint planning, goal tracking, standups, backlog refinement, and retrospectives; create, prioritize, and delegate backlog work. Candidates with relevant experience may serve as Scrum Master.
• Design and build Terraform modules, state management, and multi-environment patterns, and extend reference implementations and guardrails for consistent, safe infrastructure delivery.
• Contribute to EKS cluster provisioning and lifecycle management in multi-tenant environments, including Karpenter autoscaling, add-on lifecycle management, and cluster upgrades.
• Evaluate and tune platform services for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency; apply Datadog and Prometheus/Grafana observability standards to pipeline and release health.
• Implement secure-by-default delivery patterns using Kyverno and Cilium in partnership with security stakeholders.
• Communicate release plans, process changes, and delivery health to IT leadership and stakeholder teams; represent the platform in architecture and change reviews.
• Author technical design documents and proposals, validate them with Cloud Team architects, and drive implementation; align CI/CD and GitOps capabilities with the multi-year platform roadmap.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on GitOps, CI/CD, and delivery practices; participate in interview loops and help uphold hiring standards.
• Contribute to runbook standards and incident response practices; lead resolution of release- and pipeline-related incidents and drive corrective actions.
• Participate in on-call coverage, including potential 24/7 coverage.

Benefits

• Competitive annual discretionary bonus program; employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for the annual bonus.
• Opportunity for annual RSU grants.
• Competitive benefits package designed to support employees at work, at home, and at play.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior