Vice President | Enterprise & Cloud Architecture

Raymond James • Saint Petersburg, FL

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Vice President of Enterprise & Cloud Architecture is an individual-contributor technology leadership role responsible for defining the firm’s hybrid and multi-cloud target state, workload-placement standards, landing zones, data center modernization and exit roadmap, and resiliency architecture. The role accelerates cloud adoption while managing operating costs and meeting financial-services resiliency and regulatory expectations. It has no direct reports and partners closely with Infrastructure, Cloud Engineering, Platform, Enterprise Security Architecture, IT Finance, and Developer Experience teams, which retain responsibility for building and operating platforms.

The role is AI-forward and hands-on: the leader uses AI coding agents such as Claude Code or similar tools in daily architecture and migration work, and establishes safe usage patterns for architecture teams. The leader also architects infrastructure for AI workloads, including model hosting and inference, accelerated compute capacity, and data placement. The position requires executive presence and the ability to engage in detailed technical discussions with engineers as well as cost discussions with Finance.

The position follows a hybrid-friendly schedule, with three office days per week, including a Monday or Friday, at the corporate office in St. Petersburg, Florida. Travel is less than 25%. The role is not eligible for work visa sponsorship, now or in the future.

Requirements

• More than 15 years of general experience.
• 10 to 15 years of manager experience.
• 15+ years of hands-on depth across public cloud, data center, networking, storage, and resiliency.
• Experience at a hyperscaler or large technology company operating at internet scale, or at a major Wall Street or capital-markets firm operating always-on, highly regulated infrastructure.
• Experience leading a large migration or data center exit end to end.
• Daily use of Claude Code or similar agentic tools, with the ability to explain 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-level education listed as required; the posting specifies Computer and Information Science and also lists High School (HS).

Nice To Haves

• TOGAF certification.
• AWS or Azure professional-level certification.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the enterprise cloud and data center target architecture and the roadmap from the current state to the target across AWS, Azure, private cloud, and SaaS.
• Own and consistently apply a published workload-placement framework for cloud, on-premises, or SaaS, 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, plan capacity retirement, 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 into architecture through unit-cost models, rightsizing, commitment strategy, and run-cost transparency, partnering with IT Finance, which retains ownership of the numbers.
• Use AI coding agents and agentic tooling hands-on to accelerate estate discovery, dependency mapping, infrastructure-as-code generation and review, migration planning, and decision records; establish safe usage patterns for architecture teams.
• Architect 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 paved road for teams consuming cloud.
• Conduct architecture reviews for major infrastructure and platform decisions; use 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, dental, and vision insurance.
• Life insurance.
• Critical illness insurance and accident insurance.
• Disability benefits.
• Retirement savings.
• Paid time off, including vacation, holidays, and sick leave.
• Parental leave.
• Compensation may include additional cash or equity, discretionary bonuses, or commissions.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive