Cloud Platform Architect

Morgan Stanley•Alpharetta, GA

About The Position

The Cloud Platform Architect is a Lead Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering position at the Director level in Morgan Stanley’s Technology division. The role supports the ETRADE Cloud program, contributing to the design and evolution of secure, resilient, scalable, automated, and well-governed platform capabilities, with primary expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The architect translates application, business, security, infrastructure, and operational requirements into reusable platform architecture patterns aligned with enterprise architecture, engineering, risk, and regulatory standards. The architect works across platform engineering, application development, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, networking, operations, risk, and governance teams. The role shapes target-state and transitional architectures, establishes reusable platform patterns, supports proofs of concept, and guides engineering teams through implementation and production readiness. Its primary focus is enabling ETRADE workloads on GCP while supporting integration with existing enterprise environments and, where applicable, AWS services. The position spans GCP platform and landing-zone architecture, platform engineering, infrastructure, cloud-native engineering, security and identity, resilience and operations, application modernization, and governance. Expected work products include target-state, transitional, and migration architectures; platform reference patterns and onboarding standards; implementation guidance; architecture artifacts and decision records; POC documentation; and risk and remediation updates. The role also partners with stakeholders to drive architecture decisions through implementation, mentors engineering teams, and supports production readiness.

Requirements

Professional experience in cloud engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, solution architecture, or a related technical discipline.
Hands-on knowledge of GCP organizations, folders, projects, billing structures, IAM, service accounts, organization policies, shared VPCs, and landing zones.
Experience with GCP compute, container, storage, networking, security, messaging, database, monitoring, and automation services.
Working knowledge of Google Kubernetes Engine and Kubernetes, including private clusters, node pools, workload identity, network policies, ingress, autoscaling, upgrades, security, and resiliency.
Working knowledge of GCP networking, including VPCs, subnets, routing, firewall policies, Private Service Connect, private service access, Cloud NAT, Cloud DNS, load balancing, VPN, and dedicated connectivity.
Strong infrastructure foundation across compute, storage, networking, DNS, load balancing, proxies, firewalls, certificates, secrets, and key management.
Experience with Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code technologies, CI/CD, GitOps, policy as code, automated testing, vulnerability scanning, and release governance.
Understanding of platform engineering principles, including platform-as-a-product, self-service capabilities, reusable templates, paved roads, developer experience, automation, and platform lifecycle management.
Familiarity with cloud migration and modernization patterns, including rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, containerization, decomposition, and phased migration.
Familiarity with APIs, API gateways, microservices, event-driven architecture, messaging, caching, relational databases, and NoSQL platforms.
Ability to define monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, audit logging, service-level indicators, and service-level objectives.
Knowledge of high availability, disaster recovery, backup and restoration, capacity planning, performance engineering, cost optimization, and operational readiness.
Experience creating architecture diagrams, reference patterns, standards, architecture decision records, and implementation guidance for engineering teams.
Exposure to financial services, regulated industries, or similarly high-control environments.
Sound technical judgment to balance security, resilience, scalability, performance, cost, portability, delivery speed, and operational complexity.
Strong written and verbal communication for engineering, risk, governance, and leadership audiences.
Ability to lead and contribute effectively to cross-functional technical discussions and drive decisions and actions through closure.
Ability to translate complex technical topics into clear architecture recommendations and practical implementation guidance.
Strong documentation discipline, analytical problem-solving skills, and attention to implementation detail.
Ability to collaborate across organizational boundaries, mentor engineers, share knowledge, and influence without direct authority.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting large-scale cloud transformation, platform modernization, or application migration programs.
Experience with AWS architecture and core services such as VPC, IAM, EKS, EC2, S3, RDS, KMS, Route 53, load balancing, private connectivity, and CloudWatch.
Exposure to hybrid or multi-cloud architectures spanning GCP, AWS, enterprise data centers, and third-party providers, including identity federation and cross-cloud connectivity.
Exposure to Digital Assets platforms, including custody technology, tokenization, blockchain integration, wallet and key-management concepts, transaction workflows, and secure connectivity to third-party providers.
Experience supporting digital brokerage, trading, wealth management, banking, or other financial-services workloads.
Familiarity with cloud cost management, resource optimization, capacity management, and FinOps practices.
Familiarity with service mesh, API management, container security, software-supply-chain security, and zero-trust architecture.
Familiarity with financial-services controls, technology-risk management, security architecture reviews, change governance, and production-readiness assessments.
Google Cloud, AWS, Kubernetes, security, networking, or enterprise architecture certifications.

Responsibilities

Own and contribute to end-to-end platform engineering architecture for ETRADE cloud capabilities, from conceptual design through implementation and production readiness.
Define target-state, transitional, and migration architectures for applications moving from existing environments to secure cloud-native platforms.
Develop reference architectures, architecture principles, reusable patterns, standards, guardrails, and decision records for platform services.
Design cloud landing-zone capabilities, including organization and project structures, networking, identity, security controls, logging, monitoring, policy enforcement, and operational governance.
Create platform architecture patterns for Kubernetes, workload identity, APIs, event-driven services, data services, observability, resiliency, and automation.
Design and guide GCP capabilities using services such as GKE, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud DNS, Secret Manager, Cloud KMS, and Cloud Monitoring.
Define platform product capabilities and paved-road patterns that enable secure self-service provisioning, consistent developer experience, and repeatable workload onboarding.
Establish architecture for infrastructure as code, CI/CD, GitOps, policy as code, configuration management, automated testing, vulnerability scanning, artifact governance, and environment promotion.
Design infrastructure architecture covering virtual networks, subnets, routing, firewalls, private connectivity, ingress, egress, DNS, proxies, load balancing, certificates, secrets, and key management.
Define secure connectivity patterns across GCP, enterprise data centers, SaaS providers, external services, and AWS where required.
Guide GKE and Kubernetes architecture, including private clusters, workload identity, secrets management, ingress, autoscaling, network policy, cluster security, resiliency, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
Define identity and access-management patterns for federation, service accounts, role-based access, workload identity, privileged access, and least-privilege controls.
Define high-availability, disaster-recovery, backup, restoration, capacity, performance, observability, and production-support architecture patterns.
Lead and participate in architecture reviews, technical evaluations, risk assessments, and POCs; document decisions, trade-offs, dependencies, risks, and remediation actions.
Create and maintain context, logical, physical, deployment, security, network, integration, sequence, and data-flow architecture artifacts.
Partner with product, application, engineering, security, infrastructure, risk, governance, and operations stakeholders to drive architecture decisions through implementation and closure.
Mentor engineering teams on platform architecture standards, pattern adoption, non-functional requirements, and production-readiness expectations.
Deliver ETRADE target-state, transitional, and migration cloud platform architectures; GCP landing-zone and related architecture documentation; platform engineering patterns and workload-onboarding standards; GKE and Kubernetes guidance; infrastructure and modernization artifacts; engineering and operational standards; and architecture, POC, risk, and remediation documentation.