Principal AWS Solution Architect — Cloud Advisory & Escalation

Stefanini, Inc; Southfield (MI); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Part time

Job summary

Stefanini North America is seeking a Principal AWS Solution Architect for an advisory, consulting-focused role. You will not provision infrastructure daily; you will guide enterprise clients on architectural decisions, risk, and cost.

The role emphasizes written deliverables, Well-Architected governance, and strategic roadmapping across multiple accounts. Location is primarily remote in the United States with limited travel, reporting to the Director of Presales Solution Architecture within the

Qualifications

• Twelve or more years in enterprise IT infrastructure, architecture, or engineering.
• Seven or more years designing, architecting, and supporting production AWS environments at enterprise scale.
• Five or more years in a client-facing consulting, professional services, or advisory capacity.
• Demonstrable architectural depth across AWS networking, security, IAM, monitoring, and compute.
• Hybrid and distributed network architecture with transit design and private connectivity.
• Designing high availability and disaster recovery for stateful workloads.
• Identity federation and least-privilege access design.
• Practical cloud financial management experience with cost modelling.
• Working fluency to review infrastructure-as-code estates.
• Experience across many locations with wide-area connectivity.
• Experience in regulated or mission-critical environments.
• Ability to write client-facing technical documents and present to executives.
• Authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Responsibilities

• Lead advisory accounts as lead architect of record with continuity across engagements.
• Own architectural decision records including rationale and trade-offs.
• Lead Well-Architected Reviews and produce prioritized remediation roadmaps.
• Develop multi-year technical roadmaps that balance business and technical constraints.
• Provide HA/DR and network architecture direction for distributed estates.
• Conduct security architecture assessments and IAM design.
• Lead cloud financial management, tagging, and unit-cost modelling.
• Review IaC strategy and provide improvement guidance.
• Act as trusted technical advisor to client executives and engineers.

Skills

Executive presence

Written clarity

Judgment under ambiguity

Commercial awareness

Restraint

Composure in incidents

Capability transfer

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline

Master's degree in technical or business discipline (preferred)

Equivalent professional experience accepted in place of a degree

Job description

Job Details

SFDC Solution Designer

Principal AWS Solution Architect – Cloud Advisory & Escalation Southfield, MI Posted: 8/19/2026

Job Category: SFDC Solution Designer

Position Type: Part Time

Duration: 5 months

Shift: 1

Remaining Positions: 1

Details: Stefanini Groupis looking for Principal AWS Solution Architect - Cloud Advisory & Escalation for a globally recognized company!

Thank you!

Role: Principal AWS Solution Architect - Cloud Advisory & Escalation, Stefanini North America

Hiring driver: Siemens AWS Cloud Architecture & Engineering Retainer (Desigo CC building management platform, distributed retail estate) plus the wider Cloud & Infrastructure advisory pipeline STEFANINI North America | Cloud & Infrastructure Practice

Principal AWS Solution Architect Cloud Advisory & Escalation Practice Cloud & Infrastructure, Stefanini North America

Reports to Director, Presales Solution Architecture

Location United States - remote, with occasional client travel

Travel Limited. Expected under 15%, primarily for client workshops and architecture review boards

Employment type Full-time. Open to qualified subcontract and contract-to-hire candidates through approved vendor partners

Engagement model Advisory retainer delivery across three to five concurrent enterprise accounts, plus presales solution support

Alternate titles Senior AWS Solutions Architect · Principal Cloud Architect · AWS Cloud Advisory Architect

Posting date August 17, 2026

1. Summary

Stefanini North America is hiring a Principal AWS Solution Architect to serve as the senior technical advisor of record for enterprise clients who operate their own AWS environments and need architectural judgment, escalation depth, and strategic direction they do not have in-house.

This is a consulting and advisory role, not a build role. You will not be the person provisioning infrastructure day to day. You will be the person a client's operations team calls when the decision is architectural, the change is significant, the incident is serious, or the cost curve has started bending the wrong way. Your influence comes from judgment, written clarity, and earned trust rather than from administrative control of the environment.

2.1 Strategic advisory and architecture ownership

• Serve as the named lead architect of record for assigned advisory accounts, maintaining relationship and technical continuity across the full engagement term rather than rotating in and out.
• Own the architectural decision record for each account - decisions taken, alternatives considered, rationale, trade-offs accepted, and the conditions under which a decision should be revisited.
• Lead formal AWS Well-Architected Reviews across all pillars, and convert findings into a prioritized, effort-estimated remediation backlog the client can actually sequence and fund. A flat findings list is not an acceptable output.
• Develop and maintain multi-year technical roadmaps that account for the client's commercial model and delivery constraints, not only the technically ideal end state.
• Provide architectural direction on scalability, resiliency, high availability, and disaster recovery for stateful enterprise workloads, including recovery objective definition and recovery test design.
• Provide network architecture direction for hybrid and widely distributed estates - transit and routing domain design, private and site connectivity at scale, and segmentation patterns appropriate where operational technology and information technology environments meet.
• Conduct security architecture assessments covering identity and access design, network segmentation, administrative access patterns, detection and response tooling, and overall posture.
• Lead cloud financial management work: cost allocation and tagging strategy, commitment planning, and unit‑economics modelling - including per‑site or per‑unit cost models where a client resells a cloud‑hosted service to their own customers.
• Review infrastructure-as-code strategy, module structure, state management, pipeline design, and drift control, and advise on improvement.

2.2 Client consulting and relationship

• Act as the single point of technical trust for each assigned account, at both engineering and executive level.
• Translate architecture into commercial consequence. You will be expected to explain to a non-technical executive why an architectural choice affects margin, risk, or contractual commitment, in language that survives being repeated to their own leadership without you in the room.
• Deliver unwelcome recommendations without damaging the relationship. A meaningful part of this role is telling a client that what they want to do is a mistake and remaining the person, they call next time.
• Run design and review sessions with the client's own engineers present, deliberately building their capability rather than creating dependency on you.
• Scope discrete project work into short written work orders with hour estimates, approved by the client before work begins.
• Manage retainer consumption transparently - forecast burn‑down, flag exhaustion risk in the month it becomes visible, and never let a client be surprised by their own consumption.
• Chair recurring architecture review boards and monthly operating reviews with client technical and commercial stakeholders.

2.3 Escalation and incident leadership

• Participate in a senior escalation rotation, including on‑call coverage for severity‑one events on accounts contracted for twenty‑four‑hour response.
• Take technical command on incident bridges in environments you do not operate. This is a distinct and uncommon skill. You will be advising a client's operations team under time pressure, with incomplete information, no administrative authority, and a commercial relationship at stake.
• Lead root cause analysis after significant incidents and produce written analysis suitable for the client to share with their own customers and executives.
• Provide standby and guidance during critical maintenance windows and major change implementations.
• Maintain enough working familiarity with each account's environment that an escalation does not begin with an orientation session.

2.4 Written deliverables

This role produces documents. Written output is a primary deliverable, not an administrative afterthought, and the quality of it is a substantial part of how performance is assessed.

• Current‑state architecture documentation and diagrams.
• Well‑Architected Review findings reports with prioritized remediation roadmaps.
• Escalation runbooks and responsibility matrices (RACI: responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) agreed jointly with client operations teams.
• Cost and unit‑economics models with scaling forecasts.
• Root cause analyses and post‑incident reports.
• Every deliverable is written to be owned and used by the client's team after the engagement, not to demonstrate the author's expertise.

2.5 Practice development and presales

• Support presales pursuits as senior technical authority: discovery calls, solution shaping, technical proposal content, effort estimation, and client‑facing technical presentations.
• Contribute reusable intellectual property to the Cloud & Infrastructure practice - reference architectures, assessment frameworks, questionnaires, estimation models, and delivery accelerators.
• Serve as named backup architect on peer accounts, attending their governance sessions so that continuity coverage across the practice is real rather than nominal.
• Mentor mid‑level cloud engineers and architects through design review, pairing, and structured feedback.
• Contribute to hyperscaler partner relationships, including funding program qualification and partner competency requirements.

Your first 90 days

So those expectations are concrete on both sides: Period What success looks like

Days 1-30 Onboarded to the anchor account. Current‑state architecture documented, Well‑Architected Review underway, escalation runbook and responsibility matrix drafted with the client's operations lead, and the first cost baseline established. You are the recognized point of technical contact by day thirty.

Days 31-60 Well‑Architected findings delivered as a prioritized, estimated remediation roadmap the client has accepted. Governance cadence running. First project work order scoped and approved. Supporting at least one active presales pursuit.

Days 61-90 Steady‑state advisory established on the anchor account. Second account onboarded or in transition to you. At least one reusable practice asset contributed. Client has, in their own words, told us the engagement is worth what they are paying for it.

4. Required qualifications

• Twelve or more years in enterprise IT infrastructure, architecture, or engineering.
• Seven or more years designing, architecting, and supporting production AWS environments at enterprise scale.
• Five or more years in a client‑facing consulting, professional services, or advisory capacity - an internal architecture role alone is not sufficient preparation for this position.
• Demonstrable architectural depth across AWS networking, security, identity and access management, monitoring and observability, compute, storage, and database services.
• Hybrid and distributed network architecture - transit and routing design, site‑to‑site and private connectivity, network segmentation, and the operational limits of each pattern at scale.
• Designing high availability and disaster recovery for stateful workloads, including Windows Server and relational database estates. Familiarity with database‑level availability and replication patterns.
• Identity federation, least‑privilege access design, credential‑free administrative access patterns, and security posture assessment.
• Practical cloud financial management experience - allocation, tagging strategy, commitment planning, and cost modelling. Comfort with unit economics is strongly preferred.
• Working fluency sufficient to review and critique an infrastructure‑as‑code estate. You do not need to be the primary author, but you must be able to tell good from bad and say why.
• Experience supporting environments spanning many physical locations, where wide‑area connectivity is a primary availability concern.
• Experience in regulated, clinical, industrial, or otherwise mission‑critical environments where downtime carries consequence beyond inconvenience.
• Demonstrated ability to write client‑facing technical documents and to present credibly to executive audiences.
• Authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

5. Certifications

5.1 Required

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, current and in good standing. This certification is required. Candidates must be able to provide a verification link or digital badge confirming the credential is active and not expired. AWS certifications lapse after three years, and an expired credential does not meet this requirement.

5.2 Strongly preferred

• AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty
• AWS Certified Security – Specialty

5.3 Additional credentials that add value

• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
• FinOps Certified Practitioner or FinOps Certified Professional
• Professional‑level certification in a second cloud platform – Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Our clients are rarely single‑cloud and multi‑cloud fluency is genuinely useful here.
• TOGAF or comparable enterprise architecture certification
• CISSP or comparable security certification
• ITIL 4 Foundation – relevant to escalation, incident, and change discipline in client operating environments

A note on certifications generally.

The Professional‑level AWS certification is a threshold, not a differentiator. It confirms you have the vocabulary. It does not tell us whether you can hold an incident bridge, write a document a client will act on, or tell a client something they do not want to hear. Those are what we will actually assess.

6. Education

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Master's degree in a technical or business discipline is a plus but is not expected and carries no advantage over equivalent depth of experience.
• Equivalent professional experience is accepted in place of a degree. For a role at this level, twelve years of demonstrated architectural work is stronger evidence than a qualification earned two decades ago. Candidates without a degree should not be screened out on that basis, and vendors should not filter on it.

7. Consulting and advisory competencies

Executive presence Credible with a client's CIO and equally credible with their network engineer, adjusting register without changing substance.

Written clarity Able to produce a document that a client acts on without a follow‑up call to explain it. We assess this directly through a writing sample.

Judgment under ambiguity Comfortable making a defensible recommendation on incomplete information, stating the assumptions explicitly, and revising publicly when they prove wrong.

Constructive disagreement Able to tell a client their plan is a mistake, hold that position under pressure, and preserve the relationship.

Commercial awareness Understands that the client has a business model, a contract, and a margin, and that the best architecture is the one that serves those - not the most sophisticated one available.

Restraint Knows when not to re‑architect. Recognizes that a working system with known flaws is often the correct answer, and can distinguish genuine risk from personal preference. This is the clearest marker of seniority we look for.

Composure in incidents Calm, structured, and directive on a bridge call. Establishes what is known, what is assumed, and what to do next, without adding pressure to a team already under it.

Capability transfer Measures success partly by whether the client needs you less over time, and is comfortable with that.

8. Screening questions for vendor partners

Please use these to qualify candidates before submission. A candidate who cannot answer these substantively is not a fit for this role, regardless of certification profile, and submitting them wastes everyone's time including theirs.

• Describe an incident bridge you led in a client environment your own team did not operate. What did you do in the first fifteen minutes, and what did you deliberately not do?
• Describe a time you recommended against something a client had already decided to do. How did you make the case, what was the outcome, and what happened to the relationship afterwards?
• Walk through how you would determine whether a client's cloud cost is scaling linearly or sub‑linearly with the number of sites or units their service supports, and what you would do about it if it were linear.
• How would you make a stateful Windows and relational database workload highly available in AWS? Talk through the options and be specific about the trade‑offs you would accept and why.
• At what point does managing site‑to‑site connectivity individually stop being viable for a distributed estate, what replaces it, and how would you identify that the threshold is approaching before it becomes urgent?
• Describe a Well‑Architected Review you led. How did you prioritize the findings, and how much of the remediation did the client actually complete?
• You are engaged on a retainer of a fixed number of annual hours across several clients. Consumption is unpredictable. How do you manage your attention and set expectations, so no client feels deprioritized?
• Tell us about a piece of technical advice you gave that turned out to be wrong. How did you find out, and what did you do?

9. How this role maps to client requirements

The anchor client set out the qualifications they expect of the consultants assigned to their engagement. This role has been specified directly against those criteria so that the hire is defensible to the client as well as internally.

Client‑stated qualification Where this role addresses it AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification Section 5.1 - required, with active verification mandatory at submission. Demonstrated experience designing and supporting enterprise‑scale AWS environments Section 5 - seven or more years of production AWS architecture at enterprise scale. Expertise in AWS networking, security, identity, monitoring, and infrastructure services Section 5 core depth requirements, reinforced by the specialty certifications preferred in Section 6.2. Experience supporting hosted application environments with distributed endpoint connectivity Section 5 - distributed estate experience where wide‑area connectivity is a primary availability concern. Experience with regulated or mission‑critical operational environments Section 5 - mission‑critical context requirement. Ability to work collaboratively with internal operations teams and mentor where appropriate Sections 3.2 and 3.5 - capability transfer is a stated responsibility and Section 8 assesses it as a competency. A trusted technical advisory relationship across the service lifecycle Section 3.1 - named architect of record with continuity across the full engagement term, supported by the backup coverage model in Section 3.5.

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Pay Range: Based on Experience

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