Location: Remote, United States

Travel: Up to 20%

Employment Type: Full-Time

This is a senior technical architecture role for someone who combines a strong foundation in enterprise technology architecture and engineering with deep, hands-on AWS expertise. The ideal candidate understands not only how to architect AWS infrastructure, but how to design and evolve modern SaaS products and distributed systems for scalability, resilience, security, performance, operational efficiency, and sustainable cloud economics.

You will work across engineering, product, security, cloud operations, and architecture teams to translate complex business and technical requirements into actionable cloud designs, establish reusable architectural patterns, and guide teams toward consistent AWS best practices.

We're particularly interested in architects who understand the realities of operating commercial SaaS products at scale, including cloud-native and serverless architectures, microservices, event-driven systems, automation, observability, security, governance, and cost optimization.

What You'll Do

  • Lead the architecture and design of cloud-native, elastic, resilient commercial SaaS products on AWS.
  • Design secure, scalable, highly available, performant, and cost-conscious AWS architectures.
  • Architect distributed, microservices, serverless, and event-driven systems appropriate for modern SaaS environments.
  • Translate product and business requirements into practical cloud architecture and implementation strategies.
  • Define and maintain cloud architecture standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns, and design principles.
  • Develop architectural blueprints covering infrastructure, applications, integrations, services, and data flows.
  • Establish and guide AWS cloud governance, including architectural guardrails, standards, and usage policies.
  • Conduct architecture and design reviews to ensure solutions align with enterprise strategy, AWS best practices, and SaaS product requirements.
  • Ensure cloud architectures support applicable security and regulatory requirements, including SOC 2 and HIPAA.
  • Guide adoption and optimization of Infrastructure-as-Code, including Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation
  • Advance CI/CD, DevOps, automation, and deployment practices across cloud environments
  • Establish and enforce cloud security practices involving IAM, encryption, network segmentation, and secure SaaS design.
  • Develop cloud observability strategies leveraging technologies such as Amazon CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Grafana.
  • Architect for operational resilience, including availability, scalability, fault tolerance, recoverability, and performance
  • Evaluate AWS architectures for efficiency and identify opportunities to improve cloud utilization and control unnecessary spend.
  • Incorporate FinOps and cloud economics into architectural decision-making, including cost forecasting, financial impact, and ROI
  • Mentor architects and engineers and provide technical leadership across complex cloud initiatives.
  • Partner with engineering, product management, cloud operations, security, and architecture stakeholders to align technical decisions with enterprise and product goals
  • Help engineering teams balance architectural quality with delivery speed, operational requirements, security, and financial responsibility.

What We're Looking For

Required Experience

  • 10+ years of progressive experience across technology architecture and/or engineering, which may include cloud architecture, solutions architecture, software/application architecture, infrastructure architecture, platform engineering, cloud engineering, or closely related disciplines
  • 5+ years of substantial hands-on AWS experience, including designing and implementing complex AWS architectures
  • Demonstrated experience architecting commercial, cloud-native SaaS products or platforms
  • Significant experience designing complex distributed systems and enterprise-scale cloud solutions
  • Deep AWS architecture expertise spanning areas such as:
    • Compute
    • Networking
    • Storage
    • Integration services
    • Serverless technologies
    • Identity and access management
    • Security
  • Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture patterns, microservices, serverless architectures, and event-driven systems
  • Experience designing SaaS environments for scalability, resilience, high availability, performance, security, and operational efficiency
  • Advanced knowledge of AWS security, including IAM, encryption, network security, segmentation, and secure cloud design
  • Experience working with security and compliance requirements applicable to enterprise or commercial SaaS environments
  • Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience with Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation
  • Strong understanding of modern DevOps, CI/CD, and deployment automation practices
  • Experience with cloud observability, monitoring, logging, and performance management using technologies such as CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, or comparable platforms
  • Ability to troubleshoot and provide architectural direction for complex cloud and distributed-system challenges
  • Experience establishing or working within cloud governance, architectural standards, and reusable design patterns
  • Strong communication skills with the ability to translate complex architectural decisions for engineering, product, security, operations, and business stakeholders
  • Demonstrated technical leadership and experience mentoring engineers and/or architects

What Will Differentiate You

We're particularly interested in candidates who have gone beyond simply deploying infrastructure in AWS and have helped organizations build, operate, modernize, or scale commercial SaaS products.

Strong candidates will understand how architectural decisions affect:

  • SaaS scalability and elasticity
  • Application and service reliability
  • Distributed-system performance
  • Fault tolerance and recoverability
  • Security and tenant/customer protection
  • Deployment velocity
  • Observability and operational support
  • AWS consumption and cloud costs
  • Engineering productivity
  • Long-term maintainability and technical debt

Experience making these tradeoffs in a real-world SaaS environment will be highly valuable in this role.

Preferred Experience

Additional experience in the following areas is highly valued:

  • AWS Well-Architected Framework and conducting architecture/design reviews
  • Cloud governance frameworks such as CIS Benchmarks and NIST
  • SOC 2 and/or HIPAA-regulated environments
  • FinOps, AWS cost optimization, capacity planning, and cloud cost forecasting
  • Evaluating the cost-benefit, ROI, and financial impact of proposed cloud architectures
  • AWS AI/ML services, particularly Amazon Bedrock
  • Enterprise SaaS modernization or cloud transformation initiatives
  • Large-scale platform modernization
  • Building architectural standards, reference architectures, or cloud Centers of Excellence
  • Leading architecture across multiple engineering teams, products, or business domains

Education & Certifications

Required

  • Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or a comparable advanced AWS certification

Preferred

  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
  • Additional AWS specialty or advanced certifications
  • Master's degree in a technology-related discipline

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means creating AWS architecture that is not simply technically sound, but also secure, scalable, resilient, repeatable, observable, financially responsible, and practical for engineering teams to implement and operate.

You'll help establish architectural consistency across SaaS products, improve cloud governance, create reusable patterns, strengthen security and resilience, increase automation, and enable engineering teams to deliver reliable products more efficiently.

Just as importantly, you'll help ensure cloud architecture decisions account for the economics of operating SaaS at scale, balancing technical capabilities with AWS consumption, operational complexity, engineering effort, and long-term business value.

Work Environment

  • Fully remote within the United States
  • Home-office based
  • Up to 20% travel as business needs require
  • Some scheduling flexibility may be required to support business and technical initiatives

About Novacoast

Novacoast is a technology services and staffing organization partnering with companies to identify and hire highly skilled technology professionals. For this opportunity, Novacoast is supporting a client seeking an experienced cloud architect to help advance the architecture and evolution of its enterprise AWS and SaaS ecosystem.

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, protected veteran status, disability, or any other status protected by applicable law.

Applicants must have legal authorization to work in the United States.

Application Notice: Candidates should personally complete all required screening questions and application materials. The use of AI-generated responses to screening questions may result in disqualification from consideration.