AWS Solution Architect - Cambridge (2 days a week)
We are looking for an experienced Solution Architect to design and lead the implementation of scalable, cloud-native systems on AWS. You will work across engineering, product, and business stakeholders to define architecture for distributed microservices platforms powered by event-driven patterns - translating complex requirements into resilient, production-grade solutions.
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.
