Cloud Architect
Hearst · Tampa
The Opportunity
The Cloud Architect shapes how MHK's regulated SaaS platform grows, stays secure and stays reliable. Within the Cloud Platform Engineering organization, you will define and evolve the architecture of a secure, highly available, multi-account AWS platform, owning architecture standards, reference designs, resilience patterns and technical direction across platform and application engineering teams.
You will assess existing systems, define pragmatic migration and modernization paths, and turn business and product needs into target-state AWS architectures. You will set platform standards and make architecture recommendations within the cloud domain, while implementation is delivered in partnership with platform engineering, security, operations, data and application teams, so the platform becomes more scalable, secure, reliable, operable, cost-aware and compliant.
Hybrid: This hybrid role is based in Tampa, FL. Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the Tampa area within 90 days of start.
Position Duties
Cloud Architecture and Technical Strategy
- Define target-state AWS architectures, reference architectures and decision records for secure, scalable, cloud-native SaaS platforms, and lead architecture reviews that translate product, engineering and enterprise roadmaps into implementable cloud designs.
- Design modernization strategies spanning serverless services, Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, EC2 Linux workloads, APIs and event-driven components, and establish standards for availability, scalability, performance, capacity, service boundaries, tenant isolation and operational readiness.
- Guide multi-region resilience and disaster-recovery architecture, including backup ownership, RTO and RPO targets, failover approaches and restore testing.
Security, Compliance and Risk Architecture
- Design cloud controls that support HIPAA, SOC 2 and HITRUST requirements, partnering with security and compliance teams on control-to-code mappings, audit evidence, control walkthroughs and penetration-test remediation.
- Define patterns for IAM, permission boundaries, service control policies, KMS encryption, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store and least-privilege access, and establish cloud security posture and vulnerability-management patterns using services such as AWS Config, Security Hub, Inspector, GuardDuty and CloudTrail.
Networking, Data and Platform Governance
- Define enterprise AWS networking patterns (Transit Gateway, Site-to-Site VPN, Direct Connect, PrivateLink) and set direction for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Aurora, DynamoDB and ElastiCache, including durability, backup, recovery, replication and performance tradeoffs.
- Own cloud landing-zone standards and multi-account governance across AWS Organizations and Control Tower, and create reusable Terraform module standards covering versioning, remote state, code review, drift detection, testing and safe change management.
Modernization, Transformation and Platform Enablement
- Assess current-state environments and create phased transformation roadmaps, with migration patterns for rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, containerization, serverless adoption and legacy retirement.
- Establish platform golden paths and self-service provisioning patterns that help engineering teams adopt approved AWS architectures consistently and securely.
- Define observability architecture across CloudWatch and Datadog, and improve operational readiness through patching, maintenance-window, change-management, exception and customer-notification patterns.
- Lead or facilitate complex incident reviews, and evaluate and pilot AI-assisted SRE or DevOps capabilities where they can safely improve incident triage, diagnosis or remediation.
- Balance cost, performance, reliability and security in architecture decisions, and contribute to rightsizing, savings-plan, reservation and tag-based cost-attribution initiatives.
- Guide platform and application teams through implementation, using Terraform, Python, Bash and lightweight automation to prove patterns and remove barriers, and provide architectural input to GitHub Actions or other delivery pipelines. This is not primarily a CI/CD administration role.
- Communicate architecture decisions clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders and build alignment across teams.
Position Requirements
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience in AWS cloud architecture, cloud engineering, platform engineering or a related discipline, including substantial production AWS experience.
- Demonstrated ability to define and communicate AWS architectures for highly available, secure, scalable applications or SaaS platforms.
- Demonstrated experience leading cloud modernization or transformation programs from current-state assessment through migration, implementation and operational adoption.
- Production experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code, including reusable modules, state management, versioning, testing and drift control.
- Strong understanding of AWS networking, identity and access management, encryption, logging, monitoring and multi-account architecture.
- Hands-on familiarity with AWS compute and application patterns, including ECS, Fargate, EC2 Linux, Lambda and API Gateway.
- Experience designing or operating cloud environments subject to regulated or audited security requirements.
- Ability to influence engineering teams, lead architecture discussions and make sound tradeoffs among security, reliability, performance, delivery speed and cost.
Education/Certification Requirement
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate, AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional; equivalent experience will be considered.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with healthcare software, medical technology, regulated technology or multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
- Experience with compliance-as-code tools or practices such as AWS Config rules, OPA or Conftest, CIS benchmark hardening or equivalent mechanisms.
Additional Information
Pre-Employment Requirements: All prospective employees must pass a background check and drug screening.
Benefits
At MHK, we support employees with meaningful work, opportunities to grow and benefits designed to promote health, financial security and overall wellbeing. Highlights include:
- Health coverage: Medical, dental and vision plans for full-time employees.
- Retirement: 401(k) with a generous company match.
- Time off: Generous paid time off and holiday policy.
- Benefits eligibility: Benefits begin on the first day of the month following employment.
- Health and wellness: Exercise and health club reimbursement opportunities.
- Dependent care: Monthly dependent care reimbursement opportunities.
- Income protection: Short- and long-term disability coverage.
- Life insurance: Basic term life and AD&D insurance.