Principal Infrastructure Architect - Cloud + SaaS

Syndesus•San Jose, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a highly experienced, hands-on Principal Infrastructure Architect to lead the architectural evolution of a large-scale, multi-cloud platform. This is a principal-level role — meaning the expectation goes well beyond senior: we are looking for someone who has been there and done it, who has walked into complex enterprise environments, assessed the landscape, and driven meaningful consolidation and modernization with both strategic vision and direct execution. The core mandate is rationalizing an environment with too many overlapping systems — consolidating redundant observability platforms, streamlining security infrastructure, unifying log management, and building a data tokenization capability where none currently exists. This person will report into a VP-level architect and serve as a primary SME for infrastructure strategy.

Requirements

10+ years in infrastructure engineering and architecture, with a proven track record managing large-scale cloud deployments (AWS primary; GCP/Azure also valued)
FAANG or Big Tech background is a strong differentiator
Deep enterprise experience: you've walked into sprawling, complex environments, understood the strategic vision, and driven real change — not just recommendations
Demonstrated long tenure at key roles; we are looking for people who go deep, not candidates with a string of 1–2 year stints
Kubernetes Expert: deep hands-on mastery of Kubernetes and EKS, including custom controllers, operators, and VM-to-container migration for stateful and stateless workloads
Database Reliability: strong experience architecting high-scale real-time stores (Aerospike, Redis) and analytics engines (Druid, ClickHouse)
Observability: proven ability to build observability pipelines from scratch using OpenTelemetry collectors and visualization tools (Prometheus/Grafana/Datadog)
Automation: expert-level proficiency in Go, Python, or Bash; deep CI/CD experience (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD)
Networking: deep understanding of cloud networking (VPC, Transit Gateways, Direct Connect) and protocols (gRPC, HTTP/2, WebSocket, QUIC)

Responsibilities

Audit existing infrastructure to identify and eliminate redundant technology solutions (e.g., collapsing multiple observability platforms into one)
Develop and drive data replication strategy and log infrastructure management across the enterprise
Lead proof-of-concept work to evaluate and recommend replacement technologies
Build out a net-new data tokenization solution
Serve as SME for infrastructure strategy — planning AND execution; the doing is as important as the thinking
Lead migration of legacy EC2-based workloads to Amazon EKS and Kubernetes; define standards for multi-region availability, auto-scaling, and spot instance orchestration
Architect and deploy high-performance API Gateways and LLM Gateways to manage traffic for Generative AI workloads
Implement Service Mesh (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) for advanced traffic splitting, mTLS, and observability
Design infrastructure for high-scale storage engines including AWS-native databases (DynamoDB, Aurora), OLAP systems, and real-time databases (Aerospike, Druid) supporting sub-millisecond latency
Architect scalable Pub/Sub messaging systems (Kafka, SNS/SQS, Pulsar) to enable event-driven architectures at internet scale
Define and implement a unified observability strategy based on OpenTelemetry (OTLP)
Integrate platforms such as Grafana, Datadog, and Graylog for single-pane-of-glass visibility across logs, metrics, and traces
Modernize authentication and authorization systems (OIDC, OAuth2, SPIFFE/SPIRE)
Deploy and manage centralized Secret Stores (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), security gateways, and automated certificate management
Design Zero Trust network architectures; familiarity with SOC2 and PCI-DSS a plus
Champion GitOps culture; enforce IaC best practices using Terraform, Crossplane, or Pulumi
Mentor senior infrastructure engineers and drive Well-Architected reviews
Partner cross-functionally with software teams to ensure infrastructure supports rapid product iteration