AWS Resident Architect - Senior Cloud Solutions Architect

Strategic Communications•Harrisburg, PA

About The Position

The Senior AWS Solutions Architect serves 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 rather than direct workload implementation. The Resident Architect provides ongoing architectural advice, governance, and optimization guidance after cloud implementation projects, helping sustain AWS adoption and ensuring architectures align with AWS best practices, operational maturity goals, and regulatory requirements. The position works with customer engineering teams, AWS account teams, and Strategic’s Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to support cloud platform maturity, modernization, and operational readiness. Resident Architects work within a structured advisory delivery model, typically supporting customers through monthly architectural-capacity engagements. Activities include architecture reviews, platform engineering advice, governance and compliance alignment, migration advisory, and AWS service adoption guidance. Travel depends on customer needs and may range from fully remote to periodic onsite engagement; typical travel expectations are 25–100%, with occasional higher travel during key milestones. The role is remote, hybrid, or at customer sites in the U.S. Preferred candidates reside in or around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and are willing to work onsite an average of approximately two days per week. The position requires a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent experience; AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification; at least 8 years of cloud architecture experience; and at least 5 years designing and deploying AWS architectures. Candidates must have experience supporting regulated or public-sector cloud environments and demonstrated experience in AWS networking, IAM, multi-account governance, IaC automation, and cloud security architecture. The position is full-time. 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 or more years of cloud architecture experience.
5 or more years designing and deploying AWS architectures.
Experience supporting regulated or public-sector cloud environments, such as FedRAMP, CJIS, HIPAA, NIST frameworks, or GovCloud.
Proven experience in AWS networking architecture, identity and access management, multi-account governance, infrastructure-as-code automation, and cloud security architecture.
Experience supporting AWS Organizations, landing-zone frameworks, DevSecOps pipelines, hybrid architectures, and cloud migrations and modernization programs.
Executive-level communication skills and ability to influence architecture decisions.
Customer-advisory mindset.
Strong technical documentation ability.
Ability to translate business outcomes into architecture strategies.
Must be a U.S. citizen and possess or be capable of obtaining a security clearance.
Willingness to travel as needed; typical travel expectations are 25–100%, with occasional higher travel during key milestones.
Ability to meet the described physical demands, with reasonable accommodations available.

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.
Public-sector or SLED cloud program experience.
AWS Professional Services engagement support.
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.
Residence in or around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and willingness to work onsite approximately two days per week on average.

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.
Support architecture governance processes and document design decisions.
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.
Help teams improve cloud workload reliability, scalability, and performance.
Identify cost-optimization opportunities and support FinOps alignment.
Advise on rehost, replatform, refactor, replace, and retire migration strategies.
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 for encryption, network segmentation, and logging.
Mentor customer engineering teams on AWS architecture best practices.
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.