Vice President | Enterprise & Cloud Architecture

Raymond James•Saint Petersburg, FL

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

This senior technology leader owns the architecture of where and how the firm runs its technology, including the hybrid and multi-cloud target state, workload-placement standards, landing zones, data center modernization and exit roadmap, and resiliency architecture. The role is accountable for accelerating cloud adoption while controlling run costs and meeting the resiliency and regulatory expectations of a financial services firm. The role is designed for an AI-forward practitioner who uses AI coding agents such as Claude Code in daily work for portfolio and dependency analysis, infrastructure as code, migration planning, and architecture documentation. The leader also architects platforms for AI workloads, including model hosting and inference, accelerated compute capacity, and data placement. This is an individual-contributor role with no direct reports. It partners closely with Infrastructure, Cloud Engineering, and Platform teams, which retain ownership of build and run. The role owns target architecture, standards, and workload-placement decisions, and requires executive presence and the ability to engage both senior engineers and Finance on technical and cost matters. The position follows a hybrid schedule with three in-office days per week, including a Monday or Friday, at the St. Petersburg, Florida corporate office. It is not eligible for work visa sponsorship, now or in the future. Travel is less than 25%.

Requirements

More than 15 years of general experience, with hands-on depth across public cloud, data center, networking, storage, and resiliency.
10 to 15 years of manager experience, as listed in the job posting.
Recognized subject-matter expertise in cloud and infrastructure architecture.
Experience at a hyperscaler or large technology company running at internet scale, or at a major Wall Street or capital-markets firm running always-on, highly regulated infrastructure.
End-to-end leadership of a large migration or data center exit.
Daily use of Claude Code or similar agentic tools, with the ability to demonstrate how AI improved the speed or quality of architecture and migration work.
Ability to write and review infrastructure as code and defend workload-placement decisions in detail with engineers and Finance.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer and Information Science; the posting also lists High School (HS) as required.
Less than 25% travel.

Nice To Haves

TOGAF certification (preferred, not required).
AWS or Azure professional-level certification (preferred, not required).

Responsibilities

Define and maintain the enterprise cloud and data center target architecture and roadmap across AWS, Azure, private cloud, and SaaS.
Own and consistently apply a published workload-placement framework for cloud, on-premises, or SaaS decisions, weighing cost, resiliency, data residency, latency, regulatory obligations, and exit risk.
Set landing-zone and platform standards for identity, networking, guardrails, tagging, and observability in partnership with Enterprise Security Architecture.
Own the data center modernization and exit roadmap; sequence migrations by business value and risk, retire capacity deliberately, and make stranded cost visible.
Architect resiliency and disaster recovery, including application tiering with RTO/RPO standards, multi-region and hybrid failover patterns, and architecture evidence for BCP/DR testing and regulatory resilience expectations.
Embed FinOps in architecture through unit-cost models, rightsizing and commitment strategy, and run-cost transparency, in partnership with IT Finance.
Use AI coding agents and agentic tooling hands-on to accelerate architecture and migration work, including estate discovery, dependency mapping, infrastructure-as-code generation and review, and decision records; establish safe usage patterns for architecture teams.
Architect the firm's AI infrastructure, including model hosting and inference patterns, accelerated compute capacity strategy, and data placement for AI workloads.
Partner with Developer Experience to make infrastructure as code, containers and Kubernetes, and CI/CD the default way teams consume cloud.
Run architecture reviews for major infrastructure and platform decisions using published criteria; record decisions and track exceptions to closure.
Collaborate with senior executives on strategy, investment cases, and executive-level communications and presentations.
Maintain an external view of cloud provider roadmaps, infrastructure economics, and emerging platform patterns.

Benefits

Medical insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Life insurance
Critical illness insurance
Accident insurance
Disability benefits
Retirement savings
Paid time off, including vacation, holidays, and sick leave
Parental leave
Additional compensation may include cash or equity, discretionary bonuses, or commissions.