This role is based in Houston, TX and requires working onsite 2 days per week.
As a member of the Enterprise Technology Development Team, the Staff Cloud Architect provides architecture leadership for Empyrean's cloud platforms, enterprise applications, and modernization initiatives.
This is a staff-level individual contributor role that combines long term platform strategy with deep hands-on technical execution.
The Staff Cloud Architect translates business, security, and operational requirements into scalable, reliable, and supportable cloud solutions across AWS and Kubernetes environments. This role reviews architecture designs, challenges assumptions, identifies risks early, and guides engineering teams from initial design through production. The Staff Cloud Architect establishes practical cloud platform standards including Kubernetes standards, reference architectures, deployment patterns, and decision-making practices while partnering closely with engineers, Security, QA, and technical leadership across multiple teams.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Translate business and application requirements into end-to-end cloud solutions across compute, networking, storage, identity, security.
Evaluate architectures for cloud best practices, security, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
Lead architecture and design reviews, challenge assumptions, evaluate options, and document decisions, tradeoffs, dependencies, and risks.
Assess existing systems and cloud environments to identify gaps, technical debt, failure points, and opportunities for modernization, consolidation, and automation.
Set architectural direction for infrastructure as code including reusable module patterns, state and environment strategies, policy guardrails, drift management, and safe promotion practices.
Define technical milestones, manage dependencies and risks, and support delivery within the team’s Kanban and release cadence.
Define and maintain reusable cloud reference architectures and patterns for areas such as multi-account design, networking, identity and access, compute, containers, data, integration, observability, and disaster recovery.
Apply AWS Well-Architected principles to improve operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for application and infrastructure delivery, including plan/apply workflows, promotion gates, rollback strategies, and release evidence collection.
Remain hands-on by developing proofs of concept, leading technical spikes, reviewing code and infrastructure changes, and helping teams resolve complex design or implementation issues.
Include cost modeling and cloud financial management considerations in architecture decisions, balancing business value, delivery speed, operational risk, and long-term total cost of ownership.
Use production incidents, operational data, and architecture reviews to recommend long-term remediation and maintain a prioritized architecture improvement roadmap.
Mentor engineers and technical leads, raise architecture capability through reusable guidance and coaching, and communicate recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Evaluate industry trends and recommend pragmatic improvements to platform architecture, developer experience, and delivery practices within supported value streams.
REQUIRED SKILLS AND ABILITIES
Deep hands-on AWS architecture experience across core services, including VPC, IAM, EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, Route 53, CloudFront, CloudWatch, KMS, and related networking and security controls.
Strong Kubernetes architecture and operations experience, including cluster design, workload scheduling, ingress, service networking, security, scaling, upgrades, and observability.
Ability to establish architecture governance, review standards, technical guardrails, and decision-making processes across multiple teams.
Strong knowledge of distributed…