Lead Cloud Architect

Cooley AI•Washington, DC

3d•$225,000 - $300,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Cooley AI is seeking a Lead Cloud Architect to join the Innovation team. Cooley AI is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Cooley LLP. The frontier development arm of the leading technology law firm in the world. Our mission is to bring the best-in-class practices from the technology field into the legal domain to help lead our firm and the legal industry into the AI era. All employees of Cooley AI are employees of Cooley and are seconded to Cooley AI. As a leading technology law firm, Cooley is determined to become a leader in the digital practice of law. The Lead Cloud Architect is responsible for owning the technical architecture and engineering standards for a greenfield SOC2-compliant SaaS platform built on AWS with hybrid connectivity to Azure and Databricks. This is a foundational leadership position that will have input into every infrastructure, security, and delivery decision. Specific duties and responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

Requirements

After orientation at Cooley LLP, exhibit proficiency in the Microsoft Office suite, iManage and other firm applications; demonstrated ability to learn and adopt new systems quickly
Ability to work extended and/or weekend hours, as required
Ability to travel, as required
7+ years direct applicable experience (e.g., cloud infrastructure or architecture roles)
Extensive hands-on background with AWS (IAM, networking, Organizations) and Terraform at scale
Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid architectures involving Azure connectivity
Ability to set technical direction while remaining hands-on during the buildout phase
Strong knowledge of infrastructure-as-code, zero-trust networking, and least-privilege access models

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree
Excellent analytical, problem-solving and project management skills
Ability to balance best practices with business objectives
Entrepreneurial by nature
Excellent attention to detail
Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills with ability to facilitate and solve problems
Ability to organize, prioritize and coordinate multiple activities often under tight timelines
Ability to drive projects to completion and achieve goals
Strong judgment
Team-player with collaborative spirit
Unwavering ability to handle and maintain confidentiality regarding firm information, projects, client data
High level of professionalism at all times
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence and develop talent
Proactive, analytical mindset

Responsibilities

Responsible for designing and maintaining Terraform modules, CI/CD golden path templates, and cloud infrastructure that enforce SOC 2-compliant patterns by default
Owns the "paved road" used by product engineers for deployment
Partners with the DevSecOps Engineer to validate security requirements in every template
Maintains dotted-line governance reporting to Head of Information Security and compliance matters
Serve as direct supervisor and mentor to direct reports
Provides day-to-day supervision of direct reports, ensure compliance with assigned work hours and monitor for compliance with all firm and department policies. Manage staffing coverage, review and process time logs/time off requests
Support business professional development and continued educational opportunities
In collaboration with immediate supervisor and central HR, participate in hiring, performance appraisals, counseling, termination and other employee lifecycle events
All other duties as assigned or required