Staff Cloud Architect (AWS/Kubernetes)

Location: Houston, TX, USA; hybrid with onsite work required 2 days per week.

Company

hirify.global develops and operates enterprise technology supporting benefits administration and Health & Welfare domains.

What you will do

• Translate business, application, security, and operational requirements into scalable cloud solutions across AWS and Kubernetes.
• Lead architecture and design reviews, document decisions and tradeoffs, identify risks, and establish governance standards, reference architectures, and technical guardrails.
• Assess existing environments for technical debt, failure points, modernization, consolidation, and automation opportunities.
• Define infrastructure-as-code patterns, deployment strategies, CI/CD workflows, promotion gates, rollback strategies, and release evidence collection.
• Develop proofs of concept, lead technical spikes, review code and infrastructure changes, and resolve complex design and implementation issues.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads, communicate recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders, and maintain a prioritized architecture improvement roadmap.

Requirements

• Deep hands-on AWS architecture experience across VPC, IAM, EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, Route 53, CloudFront, CloudWatch, KMS, networking, and security controls.
• Strong Kubernetes architecture and production operations experience, including cluster design, workload scheduling, ingress, service networking, security, scaling, upgrades, and observability.
• Advanced Terraform and infrastructure-as-code experience with reusable modules, remote state, environment isolation, policy validation, drift detection, and secure deployment workflows.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, cloud architecture patterns, APIs, asynchronous and event-driven integration, data flows, service boundaries, caching, and failure handling.
• Strong enterprise and hybrid-cloud architecture experience, including connectivity, DNS, identity, network segmentation, shared services, and on-premises integration.
• Strong CI/CD, automation, cloud security, observability, operational architecture, resilience, disaster recovery, performance, scalability, and maintainability experience.
• Ability to evaluate cost and operational tradeoffs, create cost estimates, and incorporate cost optimization into architecture decisions.
• 10+ years of technology experience, including at least 5 years leading the design and implementation of cloud or enterprise architectures in production environments.
• 5+ years designing and implementing solutions on AWS or a comparable public cloud platform, with strong current AWS expertise; production experience designing and operating Kubernetes-based platforms is required.
• Proven experience leading architecture for enterprise-scale, highly available, secure, and observable systems across multiple applications or teams, including cloud migration, modernization, hybrid integration, or platform transformation initiatives.
• Experience in regulated or security-sensitive environments and incorporating security, privacy, compliance, and audit requirements into solution designs.
• Demonstrated success leading technical decisions across organizational boundaries, mentoring engineers, and influencing senior stakeholders without direct management responsibility.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and influencing skills across Product, Engineering, QA, Security, Operations, and senior technical leadership.

Nice to have

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field; equivalent practical experience is considered.
• GitHub Actions and scripting experience with Bash, PowerShell, or Python.
• Familiarity with the .NET ecosystem and modern application development practices.
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or comparable advanced cloud certification.
• Experience with benefits administration and Health & Welfare domains.

Culture & Benefits

• Cross-functional collaboration with Engineering, Security, QA, Operations, Product, and technical leadership.
• Work is organized around Kanban and a release cadence.
• The role combines long-term platform strategy with hands-on technical execution.
• Equal opportunity employment, including disability and protected veteran status.