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# Principal Cloud Platform Architect - Onsite

- **Company:** Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation
- **Location:** Lake Forest, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $130,000.0 - $160,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Amazon Web Services, Computing Platforms, Architectural Patterns, Microsoft Azure, Software as a Service, Cloud Engineering, Computer Networks, Continuous Integration, Disaster Recovery, Distributed Systems, Fault Tolerance, Github, Network Control, Network Service, Reliability Engineering, Prometheus, System Testing, Data Logging, Cloud Platform System, Spring Cloud, Autoscaling, Istio, System Availability, Grafana, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), AWS ECS, Kubernetes, Infrastructure Automation Frameworks, Bicep, Linkerd (Service Mesh), Azure AKS, Cloud Optimization, Terraform, Dynatrace, AWS EKS
- **Published:** September 22, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=8912317180596e42

## About the Role

12+ years of overall software/cloud engineering experience.
5+ years of hands-on Kubernetes architecture and administration experience., Experience with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.
Experience operating SaaS platforms at scale.
Knowledge of FinOps and cloud cost optimization frameworks.
Experience with service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd.
Strong background in platform engineering and cloud-native ecosystem tools.

## Description

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Cloud Platform Architect to drive the operational maturity and scalability of our CONNECT Platform. This is a strategic, hands-on role focused on improving platform reliability, performance, scalability, resiliency, and cloud cost efficiency across Azure and AWS environments.
You will partner closely with Architecture, COE, Engineering, Testing, and Operations teams to identify systemic challenges, validate architectural solutions, and establish best practices for operating large-scale cloud-native platforms. This role emphasizes technical leadership through influence, innovation, and collaboration rather than direct authority.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Architecture & Innovation
Research, define, and validate cloud-native architectural patterns that improve scalability, reliability, availability, and operational efficiency.
Drive platform modernization initiatives across Kubernetes-based environments.
Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend strategic platform improvements.
Kubernetes & Cloud Optimization
Design and optimize large-scale deployments on Azure AKS and AWS EKS.
Develop advanced workload scheduling, auto-scaling, and resource optimization strategies.
Improve multi-tenant platform architectures and operational efficiency.
Ensure optimal utilization of compute, storage, and networking resources.
Reliability, Availability & Resilience
Architect highly available and fault-tolerant systems.
Define disaster recovery and resiliency strategies for cloud-native applications.
Establish reliability engineering practices to proactively prevent production issues.
Improve platform observability through logging, metrics, tracing, and monitoring frameworks.
Performance & Cost Management
Drive cloud cost optimization initiatives without compromising system performance.
Analyze infrastructure consumption patterns and develop scalable cost-control models.
Identify platform bottlenecks and recommend architectural improvements.
System Validation & Testing
Partner with validation and system test teams to design large-scale performance and resiliency test scenarios.
Simulate real-world customer workloads and production-scale environments.
Validate interactions between distributed system components under stress conditions.
Technical Leadership
Lead proof-of-concept initiatives and architectural prototypes.
Mentor engineering teams on cloud-native and platform engineering best practices.
Promote adoption of modern operational and automation practices across teams., Deep expertise in Kubernetes internals, including:
Control Plane
Scheduling
Networking
Service Mesh
Network Policies
Resource Management
Security
Cloud Platforms

Expert-level experience with:
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Azure Cloud Services
AWS Cloud Services
Infrastructure Automation

Strong experience with:
Terraform
Bicep
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Configuration Automation
CI/CD & GitOps, GitOps practices
ArgoCD
GitHub Actions
Azure DevOps
Modern CI/CD pipelines
Observability

Strong knowledge of:
Prometheus
Grafana
OpenTelemetry
Azure Monitor
Logging, Monitoring, and Distributed Tracing
Distributed Systems

Deep understanding of:
Large-scale distributed architectures
High Availability (HA)
Fault Tolerance
Scalability Patterns
Multi-Tenancy
Performance Engineering