Aws Solution Architect

Simon James It; Cambourne; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Simon James It in Cambridge is seeking an experienced Solution Architect to design and lead scalable, cloud-native systems on AWS. The role is hybrid with two on-site days per week, acting as the technical authority on architecture decisions across the organisation.

You will collaborate with engineering, product and C-suite to translate complex requirements into resilient, production-grade solutions, mentor senior engineers, and guide cloud modernization and cost optimisation.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering with architecture focus.
• Deep AWS expertise across core compute, storage and networking.
• Hands-on with event-driven patterns (Kafka, SQS/SNS, EventBridge).
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and/or AWS CDK.
• CI/CD and DevOps practices experience.
• Excellent stakeholder communication to engineers and executives.

Responsibilities

• Define end-to-end system architectures aligned to business goals and own the technical roadmap across domains.
• Lead service decomposition using Domain-Driven Design with bounded contexts and API contracts.
• Design event streaming with Kafka, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, and Kinesis; implement CQRS and saga orchestration.
• Architect AWS infra across EKS, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, RDS, DynamoDB, S3 and network topology; drive IaC standards.
• Partner with engineering, product, and C-suite to align strategy and present trade-offs.

Skills

Solution architecture

AWS

Event-driven architecture

Domain-Driven Design

CI/CD

DevOps

Stakeholder communication

Threat modelling

Observability

Security by design

Tools

Terraform

AWS CDK

Kafka

Amazon SQS/SNS

EventBridge

Kinesis

EKS

Lambda

ECS/Fargate

RDS

DynamoDB

S3

CloudFront

Job description

Cambridge - Hybrid - 2 days

The Opportunity

We're looking for an experienced Solution Architect to design and lead the implementation of scalable, cloud-native systems on AWS. You'll work across engineering, product and business stakeholders to define architecture for distributed microservices platforms powered by event-driven patterns — turning complex requirements into resilient, production-grade solutions. This is a high-impact, highly collaborative role. You'll be the technical authority on architecture decisions, shaping the standards and patterns engineering teams follow across the organisation.

What You'll Do

• Define end-to-end system architectures aligned to business goals, run architecture reviews and threat modelling sessions, and own the technical roadmap across multiple product domains.
• Lead service decomposition using Domain-Driven Design — defining bounded contexts, inter-service contracts, and REST/GraphQL/gRPC APIs — and set patterns for resilience (circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads) and observability (distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics).
• Design event streaming and async messaging using Kafka, Amazon SQS/SNS, EventBridge and Kinesis, including event schema standards, event sourcing, CQRS and saga orchestration.
• Design AWS infrastructure across EKS, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront and VPC networking, define IaC standards (Terraform and/or AWS CDK), and lead cloud migration and modernisation from on-premise to AWS.
• Partner with engineering leads, product managers and C-suite to align technical strategy with business objectives, presenting architecture proposals and trade-off analyses to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Embed security from day one (IAM, KMS, WAF, secrets management), design for reliability (multi-AZ, DR, SLAs/SLOs), and drive FinOps practices such as right-sizing and cost optimisation.
• Mentor and upskill senior engineers on architecture patterns and cloud-native practices.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years in a dedicated architecture role.
• Deep AWS expertise across core compute, storage and networking services.
• Hands-on with event-driven patterns — Kafka, SQS/SNS, EventBridge or Kinesis.
• Infrastructure as Code — Terraform and/or AWS CDK.
• Established CI/CD pipeline and DevOps practice experience.
• Excellent stakeholder communication — comfortable presenting to both engineers and executives.

Nice to Have

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional.
• Service mesh experience (Istio, AWS App Mesh, Linkerd).
• Data architecture: streaming pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes.
• Serverless-first architecture and Lambda-optimised design.
• Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud exposure.
• FinOps tooling (AWS Cost Explorer, Kubecost, CloudHealth).
• Familiarity with zero-trust networking and advanced IAM patterns.