Platform Architect in Chicago

This is a senior hands-on individual contributor role for an architect who can define technical direction while remaining close enough to the technology to lead proof-of-concepts, evaluate solutions, and work directly with engineering teams.

The environment combines AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, stream processing, GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, and legacy platforms supporting highly available, performance-sensitive systems.

• Define architecture and technical direction for enterprise platform capabilities
• Design scalable, resilient Kubernetes and AWS infrastructure
• Establish architecture patterns for Kafka and real-time stream processing
• Develop reference architectures, standards, guardrails, and transition plans
• Define and improve GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and configuration management practices
• Lead technical evaluations and proof-of-concepts for new platform technologies
• Partner with application, engineering, security, and operations teams
• Design for availability, performance, scalability, recoverability, and operational resilience
• Establish observability and platform monitoring standards
• Identify infrastructure risks, capacity constraints, and opportunities for modernization
• Help move complex legacy environments toward modern cloud- architecture

• 10+ years in infrastructure, platform engineering, systems architecture, or platform architecture
• Deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise, including architecture, networking, security, workload design, and operations
• Strong AWS architecture experience
• Hands-on Apache Kafka architecture and implementation experience
• Experience with Apache Flink or a comparable stream-processing framework
• Strong GitOps and infrastructure-as-code experience
• Experience with tools such as ArgoCD, Flux, Terraform and Helm
• CI/CD architecture and automation experience
• Experience working across both legacy/brownfield and cloud- environments
• Strong Linux/Unix and container experience
• Ability to develop architecture diagrams, reference architectures, technical decisions, and migration plans
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence both senior technical leaders and engineering teams

Technology Environment

Kubernetes / EKS * AWS * Kafka * Flink * Terraform * Helm * ArgoCD / Flux * CI/CD * Docker * Linux * Observability

AWS experience should include several of the following:

• EKS
• EC2
• VPC
• S3
• IAM
• KMS
• Managed streaming services
• Monitoring and logging services

Background

• Large-scale, highly available enterprise platforms
• Financial services or another regulated industry
• High-throughput or performance-sensitive systems
• Enterprise observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry or Splunk
• Platform resilience and performance engineering
• AWS Solutions Architect certification
• TOGAF or similar architecture framework experience

This is not a purely conceptual enterprise architect role.

We’re looking for someone who has personally worked with modern platform technologies and can move comfortably between architecture strategy and hands-on technical decision-making.

The strongest candidates will have substantial experience with Kubernetes + AWS + Kafka, understand how large production platforms actually operate, and be able to drive modernization in an environment where legacy and cloud- technologies must coexist.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline . Equivalent relevant professional experience will also be considered.