AWS Solutions Architect

Initialize IT
Cambridge, United Kingdom
2 days ago

Role details

Contract type
Temporary contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Working hours
Regular working hours
Languages
English

Job location

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Tech stack

API
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Cloud Engineering
Command-Query Responsibility Segregation (Software Development)
Data Architecture
Data Warehousing
Software Design Patterns
DevOps
Amazon DynamoDB
Identity and Access Management
Network Service
Zero Trust Network Access
Data Streaming
Management of Software Versions
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Data Logging
Istio
Multi-Cloud
HybridCloud
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Rate Limiting
Event Driven Architecture
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Data Lake
Kubernetes
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Integration Frameworks
Kafka
Linkerd (Service Mesh)
GraphQL
DDD (Domain Driven Development)
Event Sourcing
Api Design
REST
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Terraform
Domain Driven Design
gRPC
Dynatrace
Serverless Computing
Docker
Microservices

Job description

Architecture Design & Governance

  • Define end-to-end system architectures aligned with business goals and engineering capabilities.
  • Establish and enforce design principles, architectural standards, and best practices.
  • Conduct architecture reviews, threat modelling sessions, and design critiques.
  • Own and maintain technical roadmaps across multiple product domains.

Microservices Strategy

  • Lead service decomposition efforts using Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles.
  • Define domain boundaries, bounded contexts, and inter-service communication contracts.
  • Design RESTful, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs with a focus on backward compatibility and versioning.
  • Set patterns for service resilience: circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads, and rate limiting.
  • Establish observability standards: distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics.

Event-Driven Architecture

  • Design event streaming and async messaging systems using Apache Kafka, Amazon SQS/SNS, EventBridge, and Kinesis.
  • Define and enforce event schema standards and schema evolution strategies.
  • Implement event sourcing, CQRS, and saga orchestration patterns where appropriate.
  • Govern event-driven data flows across bounded contexts and third-party integrations.

AWS Cloud Engineering

  • Design AWS infrastructure using EKS, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, and VPC networking.
  • Define Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards using Terraform and/or AWS CDK.
  • Oversee multi-account AWS organisation structure, landing zones, and guardrails (AWS Control Tower).
  • Lead cloud migration and modernisation initiatives from on-premise to AWS.

Stakeholder Engagement

  • Partner with engineering leads, product managers, and C-suite to align technical strategy with business objectives.
  • Present architecture proposals, trade-off analyses, and risk assessments to technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Act as a trusted advisor to external clients or partners where required.
  • Mentor and upskill senior engineers on architecture patterns and cloud-native practices.

Security, Reliability & Cost

  • Embed security into architecture from day one: IAM, KMS, WAF, AWS Shield, and secrets management.
  • Design for reliability using multi-AZ deployments, DR strategies, and defined SLAs/SLOs.
  • Drive FinOps practices: right-sizing, reserved capacity planning, and cloud cost optimisation.

Requirements

Deep AWS expertise across core compute, storage, and networking services

Experience with service mesh (Istio, AWS App Mesh, Linkerd)

Microservices design: DDD, API design, service mesh, resilience patterns

Data architecture: streaming pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes

Event-driven patterns: Kafka, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis

Serverless-first architecture and Lambda-optimised design patterns

Infrastructure as Code: Terraform and/or AWS CDK

Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architecture exposure

Containers: Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, ECS

FinOps tooling: AWS Cost Explorer, Kubecost, CloudHealth

CI/CD pipelines and DevOps culture and practices

Experience mentoring and developing senior engineering talent

Strong verbal and written communication skills

Familiarity with zero-trust networking and advanced IAM patterns

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