Principal AWS Solution Architect Cloud Advisory & Escalation

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Role: Principal AWS Solution Architect Cloud Advisory & Escalation, Stefanini North AmericaHiring driver: Siemens AWS Cloud Architecture & Engineering Retainer (Desigo CC building management platform, distributed retail estate) plus the wider Cloud & Infrastructure advisory pipelineSTEFANININorth America | Cloud & Infrastructure PracticePrincipal AWS Solution ArchitectCloud Advisory & EscalationPracticeCloud & Infrastructure, Stefanini North AmericaReports toDirector, Presales Solution ArchitectureLocationUnited States remote, with occasional client travelTravelLimited. Expected under 15%, primarily for client workshops and architecture review boardsEmployment typeFull-time. Open to qualified subcontract and contract-to-hire candidates through approved vendor partnersEngagement modelAdvisory retainer delivery across three to five concurrent enterprise accounts, plus presales solution supportAlternate titlesSenior AWS Solutions Architect Principal Cloud Architect AWS Cloud Advisory ArchitectPosting dateAugust 17, 20261. SummaryStefanini North America is hiring a Principal AWS Solution Architect to serve as the senior technical advisor of record for enterprise clients who operate their own AWS environments and need architectural judgment, escalation depth, and strategic direction they do not have in-house.This is a consulting and advisory role, not a build role. You will not be the person provisioning infrastructure day to day. You will be the person a client's operations team calls when the decision is architectural, the change is significant, the incident is serious, or the cost curve has started bending the wrong way. Your influence comes from judgment, written clarity, and earned trust rather than from administrative control of the environment.2. Responsibilities2.1 Strategic advisory and architecture ownershipServe as the named lead architect of record for assigned advisory accounts, maintaining relationship and technical continuity across the full engagement term rather than rotating in and out.Own the architectural decision record for each account decisions taken, alternatives considered, rationale, trade-offs accepted, and the conditions under which a decision should be revisited.Lead formal AWS Well-Architected Reviews across all pillars, and convert findings into a prioritized, effort-estimated remediation backlog the client can actually sequence and fund. A flat findings list is not an acceptable output.Develop and maintain multi-year technical roadmaps that account for the client's commercial model and delivery constraints, not only the technically ideal end state.Provide architectural direction on scalability, resiliency, high availability, and disaster recovery for stateful enterprise workloads, including recovery objective definition and recovery test design.Provide network architecture direction for hybrid and widely distributed estates transit and routing domain design, private and site connectivity at scale, and segmentation patterns appropriate where operational technology and information technology environments meet.Conduct security architecture assessments covering identity and access design, network segmentation, administrative access patterns, detection and response tooling, and overall posture.Lead cloud financial management work: cost allocation and tagging strategy, commitment planning, and unit-economics modelling including per-site or per-unit cost models where a client resells a cloud-hosted service to their own customers.Review infrastructure-as-code strategy, module structure, state management, pipeline design, and drift control, and advise on improvement.2.2 Client consulting and relationshipAct as the single point of technical trust for each assigned account, at both engineering and executive level.Translate architecture into commercial consequence. You will be expected to explain to a non-technical executive why an architectural choice affects margin, risk, or contractual commitment, in language that survives being repeated to their own leadership without you in the room.Deliver unwelcome recommendations without damaging the relationship. A meaningful part of this role is telling a client that what they want to do is a mistake and remaining the person, they call next time.Run design and review sessions with the client's own engineers present, deliberately building their capability rather than creating dependency on you.Scope discrete project work into short written work orders with hour estimates, approved by the client before work begins.Manage retainer consumption transparently forecast burn-down, flag exhaustion risk in the month it becomes visible, and never let a client be surprised by their own consumption.Chair recurring architecture review boards and monthly operating reviews with client technical and commercial stakeholders.2.3 Escalation and incident leadershipParticipate in a senior escalation rotation, including on-call coverage for severity-one events on accounts contracted for twenty-four-hour response.Take technical command on incident bridges in environments you do not operate. This is a distinct and uncommon skill. You will be advising a client's operations team under time pressure, with incomplete information, no administrative authority, and a commercial relationship at stake.Lead root cause analysis after significant incidents and produce written analysis suitable for the client to share with their own customers and executives.Provide standby and guidance during critical maintenance windows and major change implementations.Maintain enough working familiarity with each account's environment that an escalation does not begin with an orientation session.2.4 Written deliverablesThis role produces documents. Written output is a primary deliverable, not an administrative afterthought, and the quality of it is a substantial part of how performance is assessed.Current-state architecture documentation and diagrams.Well-Architected Review findings reports with prioritized remediation roadmaps.Escalation runbooks and responsibility matrices (RACI: responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) agreed jointly with client operations teams.Cost and unit-economics models with scaling forecasts.Root cause analyses and post-incident reports.Every deliverable is written to be owned and used by the client's team after the engagement, not to demonstrate the author's expertise.2.5 Practice development and presalesSupport presales pursuits as senior technical authority: discovery calls, solution shaping, technical proposal content, effort estimation, and client-facing technical presentations.Contribute reusable intellectual property to the Cloud & Infrastructure practice reference architectures, assessment frameworks, questionnaires, estimation models, and delivery accelerators.Serve as named backup architect on peer accounts, attending their governance sessions so that continuity coverage across the practice is real rather than nominal.Mentor mid-level cloud engineers and architects through design review, pairing, and structured feedback.Contribute to hyperscaler partner relationships, including funding program qualification and partner competency requirements.

Your first 90 daysSo those expectations are concrete on both sides:PeriodWhat success looks likeDays 1-30Onboarded to the anchor account. Current-state architecture documented, Well-Architected Review underway, escalation runbook and responsibility matrix drafted with the client's operations lead, and the first cost baseline established. You are the recognized point of technical contact by day thirty.Days 31-60Well-Architected findings delivered as a prioritized, estimated remediation roadmap the client has accepted. Governance cadence running. First project work order scoped and approved. Supporting at least one active presales pursuit.Days 61-90Steady-state advisory established on the anchor account. Second account onboarded or in transition to you. At least one reusable practice asset contributed. Client has, in their own words, told us the engagement is worth what they are paying for it.4. Required qualificationsAreaRequirementTotal experienceTwelve or more years in enterprise IT infrastructure, architecture, or engineering.AWS experienceSeven or more years designing, architecting, and supporting production AWS environments at enterprise scale.Consulting experienceFive or more years in a client-facing consulting, professional services, or advisory capacity an internal architecture role alone is not sufficient preparation for this position.Core AWS depthDemonstrable architectural depth across AWS networking, security, identity and access management, monitoring and observability, compute, storage, and database services.NetworkingHybrid and distributed network architecture transit and routing design, site-to-site and private connectivity, network segmentation, and the operational limits of each pattern at scale.ResiliencyDesigning high availability and disaster recovery for stateful workloads, including Windows Server and relational database estates. Familiarity with database-level availability and replication patterns.SecurityIdentity federation, least-privilege access design, credential-free administrative access patterns, and security posture assessment.Cost managementPractical cloud financial management experience allocation, tagging strategy, commitment planning, and cost modelling. Comfort with unit economics is strongly preferred.Infrastructure as codeWorking fluency sufficient to review and critique an infrastructure-as-code estate. You do not need to be the primary author, but you must be able to tell good from bad and say why.Distributed estatesExperience supporting environments spanning many physical locations, where wide-area connectivity is a primary availability concern.Mission-critical contextExperience in regulated, clinical, industrial, or otherwise mission-critical environments where downtime carries consequence beyond inconvenience.CommunicationDemonstrated ability to write client-facing technical documents and to present credibly to executive audiences.Work authorizationAuthorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.5. Certifications5.1 RequiredAWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, current and in good standing. This certification is required. Candidates must be able to provide a verification link or digital badge confirming the credential is active and not expired. AWS certifications lapse after three years, and an expired credential does not meet this requirement.5.2 Strongly preferredAWS Certified Advanced Networking SpecialtyAWS Certified Security SpecialtyGiven that connectivity and security dominate the risk profile of the environments this role supports at least one of the two specialty certifications above materially strengthens a candidacy.5.3 Additional credentials that add valueAWS Certified DevOps Engineer ProfessionalFinOps Certified Practitioner or FinOps Certified ProfessionalProfessional-level certification in a second cloud platform Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Our clients are rarely single-cloud and multi-cloud fluency is genuinely useful here.TOGAF or comparable enterprise architecture certificationCISSP or comparable security certificationITIL 4 Foundation relevant to escalation, incident, and change discipline in client operating environmentsA note on certifications generally. The Professional-level AWS certification is a threshold, not a differentiator. It confirms you have the vocabulary. It does not tell us whether you can hold an incident bridge, write a document a client will act on, or tell a client something they do not want to hear. Those are what we will actually assess.6. EducationBachelor's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.Master's degree in a technical or business discipline is a plus but is not expected and carries no advantage over equivalent depth of experience.Equivalent professional experience is accepted in place of a degree. For a role at this level, twelve years of demonstrated architectural work is stronger evidence than a qualification earned two decades ago. Candidates without a degree should not be screened out on that basis, and vendors should not filter on it.7. Consulting and advisory competenciesThese are assessed as rigorously as the technical requirements. They are the difference between a strong architect and a strong advisor, and this role needs the second.CompetencyWhat we are looking forExecutive presenceCredible with a client's CIO and equally credible with their network engineer, adjusting register without changing substance.Written clarityAble to produce a document that a client acts on without a follow-up call to explain it. We assess this directly through a writing sample.Judgment under ambiguityComfortable making a defensible recommendation on incomplete information, stating the assumptions explicitly, and revising publicly when they prove wrong.Constructive disagreementAble to tell a client their plan is a mistake, hold that position under pressure, and preserve the relationship.Commercial awarenessUnderstands that the client has a business model, a contract, and a margin, and that the best architecture is the one that serves those not the most sophisticated one available.RestraintKnows when not to re-architect. Recognizes that a working system with known flaws is often the correct answer, and can distinguish genuine risk from personal preference. This is the clearest marker of seniority we look for.Composure in incidentsCalm, structured, and directive on a bridge call. Establishes what is known, what is assumed, and what to do next, without adding pressure to a team already under it.Capability transferMeasures success partly by whether the client needs you less over time, and is comfortable with that.8. Screening questions for vendor partnersPlease use these to qualify candidates before submission. A candidate who cannot answer these substantively is not a fit for this role, regardless of certification profile, and submitting them wastes everyone's time including theirs.Describe an incident bridge you led in a client environment your own team did not operate. What did you do in the first fifteen minutes, and what did you deliberately not do?Describe a time you recommended against something a client had already decided to do. How did you make the case, what was the outcome, and what happened to the relationship afterwards?Walk through how you would determine whether a client's cloud cost is scaling linearly or sub-linearly with the number of sites or units their service supports, and what you would do about it if it were linear.How would you make a stateful Windows and relational database workload highly available in AWS? Talk through the options and be specific about the trade-offs you would accept and why.At what point does managing site-to-site connectivity individually stop being viable for a distributed estate, what replaces it, and how would you identify that the threshold is approaching before it becomes urgent?Describe a Well-Architected Review you led. How did you prioritize the findings, and how much of the remediation did the client actually complete?You are engaged on a retainer of a fixed number of annual hours across several clients. Consumption is unpredictable. How do you manage your attention and set expectations, so no client feels deprioritized?Tell us about a piece of technical advice you gave that turned out to be wrong. How did you find out, and what did you do?9. How this role maps to client requirementsThe anchor client set out the qualifications they expect of the consultants assigned to their engagement. This role has been specified directly against those criteria so that the hire is defensible to the client as well as internally.Client-stated qualificationWhere this role addresses itAWS Solutions Architect Professional certificationSection 5.1 required, with active verification mandatory at submission.Demonstrated experience designing and supporting enterprise-scale AWS environmentsSection 5 seven or more years of production AWS architecture at enterprise scale.Expertise in AWS networking, security, identity, monitoring, and infrastructure servicesSection 5 core depth requirements, reinforced by the specialty certifications preferred in Section 6.2.Experience supporting hosted application environments with distributed endpoint connectivitySection 5 distributed estate experience where wide-area connectivity is a primary availability concern.Experience with regulated or mission-critical operational environmentsSection 5 mission-critical context requirement.Ability to work collaboratively with internal operations teams and mentor where appropriateSections 3.2 and 3.5 capability transfer is a stated responsibility and Section 8 assesses it as a competency.A trusted technical advisory relationship across the service lifecycleSection 3.1 named architect of record with continuity across the full engagement term, supported by the backup coverage model in Section 3.5.





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