Cloud Architect

Clayco; St. Louis (MO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Medical, dental, vision plans

401k with company match

Job summary

Clayco is seeking a Cloud Engineer to own and evolve our Azure and AWS cloud estate. You will implement modern IaC, automate operations, and raise production readiness through AI-assisted tooling. The role emphasizes reliability, security, and cost management across multi-cloud workloads.

You will design scalable patterns, manage containers and Kubernetes, and partner with Platform Engineering to deliver resilient, observable services. A strong focus on automation and documentation is expected.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on cloud experience with Azure and familiarity with AWS.
• Experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting production workloads.
• Terraform experience plus scripting with PowerShell, Python, or Bash.
• Reliability and observability focus with secure, cost-aware design.
• Security, networking, and policy enforcement in cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, provision, and operate production workloads across Azure and AWS environments.
• Own workload reliability, troubleshoot incidents, and improve capacity and resilience.
• Modernize workloads with containers, Kubernetes, and other hosting patterns.
• Manage infrastructure, configuration, and images as code; build reusable automation.
• Own traffic management and connectivity requirements with Network Engineering.
• Build security into workload design with identity controls and secret management.
• Maintain observability dashboards and alerts as code for on-call engineers.
• Treat cost as an engineering responsibility and optimize resource usage.
• Design high availability and disaster recovery patterns with backup and failover procedures.
• Use AI tools daily for code, troubleshooting, and documentation.

Skills

Azure

AWS familiarity

Reliability engineering

Automation mindset

Tools

Terraform

PowerShell

Python

Bash

Datadog

Ansible

Packer

CloudFormation

Job description

About Us

Clayco is a full-service, turnkey real estate development, master planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm that safely delivers clients across North America the highest quality solutions on time, on budget, and above and beyond expectations. With $8.1 billion in revenue for 2025, Clayco specializes in the \"art and science of building,\" providing fast track, efficient solutions for mission critical, industrial, life sciences, power & energy, aviation, commercial, institutional, residential and sports & entertainment related building projects.

The Role We Want You For

Cloud Engineering owns the day-to-day operation, evolution, and reliability of our cloud estate. The majority runs in Azure (application gateways, App Service Environments, storage, contains, Functions, VMs, and Azure SQL), with traditional lift-and-shift constructs still doing real work alongside more modern patterns. AWS is a meaningful and growing part of the picture too. This is the team that keeps that environment running well: provisioning, optimizing, troubleshooting, securing, and moving workloads onto code-defined patterns. This role brings modern IaC, automation, and engineering discipline to the cloud estate directly, and helps raise the bar on what \"production-ready\" looks like here. his is an AI-forward position. Senior leadership is all-in on AI, and we want someone who genuinely uses it every day for code, troubleshooting, documentation, and reasoning. Not as a buzzword. As a daily multiplier.

The Specifics of the Role

• Design, provision, and operate production workloads across our Azure and AWS environments. Anticipate growth and establish infrastructure patterns that scale with the business.
• Own workload reliability and performance. Troubleshoot incidents, resolve underlying problems, and improve capacity, resilience, and supportability.
• Modernize existing workloads through practical, incremental improvements. Adopt containers, Kubernetes, and other modern hosting approaches where they improve reliability, portability, and operational efficiency.
• Manage infrastructure, configuration, and images as code. Build reusable automation, bring operational changes back into code, and use established delivery workflows in partnership with Platform Engineering.
• Own application traffic management and workload connectivity requirements, partnering with Network Engineering on the underlying connectivity and shared network services.
• Build security into workload design and operation through appropriate identity and access controls, secret management, network segmentation, hardened configurations, and policy enforcement.
• Build observability into everything you design and operate. Maintain dashboards, monitors, and service-level objectives as code, with actionable alerts that help on-call engineers identify and resolve problems quickly.
• Treat cost as an ongoing engineering responsibility. Improve visibility and allocation, right-size resources, tune scaling behavior, and eliminate unnecessary consumption.
• Design and build out high availability and disaster recovery capabilities. Evaluate and select same-provider and multi-cloud resiliency patterns based on workload criticality, recovery objectives, cost, and operational complexity. Establish documented, tested backup, failover, and recovery procedures.

• Use AI tools in daily engineering work and build AI-assisted operational automation where it provides measurable value. Reduce repetitive work in troubleshooting, incident triage, runbook execution, drift detection, and documentation while validating results and maintaining operational control.

Requirements

• Cloud platforms: 7+ years of hands-on cloud experience, with strong Azure expertise and working familiarity with AWS. Substantial experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting production workloads across compute, storage, networking, and application hosting.
• Architecture and modernization: Experience modernizing existing workloads through containers, Kubernetes, and other modern hosting patterns. Ability to anticipate scale and design for reliability, portability, and operational simplicity while evaluating cost and platform dependencies.
• Infrastructure as code and automation: Production Terraform experience, including modules and state management, plus scripting in PowerShell, Python, or Bash to provision, configure, and operate workloads using established delivery workflows.
• Reliability and observability: Experience diagnosing production incidents, tuning workload performance, and implementing dashboards, actionable alerts, and log analysis. Familiarity with maintaining observability configuration as code and validating backup, failover, and recovery procedures.
• Security and networking: Working knowledge of cloud networking, including private connectivity, DNS, and network access controls. Experience applying identity and access controls, secret management, and policy enforcement in partnership with network and security teams.
• Cost management: Practical experience improving cloud cost visibility and efficiency through tagging, right-sizing, scaling policies, and ongoing review of resource utilization.

• Engineering practices and applied AI: Strong ownership, clear communication, and a habit of turning recurring operational work into automation. Regular use of AI tools for code, troubleshooting, analysis, and documentation, with sound judgment and validation of their output.

Preferred Experience

• Direct experience with Datadog, Ansible, Packer, CloudFormation, or cloud security and policy tooling.
• Portfolio-level FinOps, including cost allocation, chargeback, and optimization across teams or services.
• Operational workflow or agent-based automation, using platforms such as n8n for incident triage, runbook execution, drift detection, or similar use cases.
• Relevant Azure or AWS certifications.

Some Things You Should Know

• This position will service our clients regionally.
• No other builder can offer the collaborative design-build approach that Clayco does.
• We work on creative, complex, award-winning, high-profile jobs.
• The pace is fast!

Why Clayco?

• 2025 Best Places to Work – St. Louis Business Journal, Los Angeles Business Journal, and Phoenix Business Journal.
• 2025 ENR Top 400 – Top Data Center Contractor (Top 3).
• 2025 ENR Top 100 Design-Build Firms – Design-Build Contractor (Top 5).
• 2025 ENR Top 100 Green Contractors – Green Contractor (Top 3).

Benefits

• Discretionary Annual Bonus: Subject to company and individual performance.
• Comprehensive Benefits Package Including: Medical, dental and vision plans, 401k, generous PTO and paid company holidays, employee assistance program, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage, learning & development programs and more!

Compensation

• The salary range for this position considers a wide range of factors in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: Education, qualifications, skills, training, experience, certifications, internal equity, and location. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.