Senior Cloud Architect — Azure Migration & Modernization

REW Technology Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

REW Technology Inc. is seeking a Senior Cloud Architect to lead a VMware-to-Azure migration for a large US enterprise. This senior, hands-on role drives assessment, strategy, and migration designs across Azure-native and Azure Local environments.

You will collaborate with DevOps, QA, and platform teams, delivering migration runbooks and defending technical decisions with stakeholders. The role is remote with US-hours overlap.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in infrastructure, cloud, or platform engineering.
• 3+ years as Cloud/Solution Architect or Tech Lead on migration programs.
• Hands-on VMware-to-Azure or VMware-to-hybrid migration experience.
• Experience with large estates (100+ apps or 1,000+ VMs).
• Strong Microsoft Azure architecture expertise.
• Knowledge of Terraform and Azure DevOps / GitHub pipelines.
• Excellent written and spoken English; stakeholder management.

Responsibilities

• Lead assessment of enterprise application and VM portfolios; normalize discovery data.
• Define migration dispositions and move groups across waves.
• Design target architectures for Azure-native and Azure Local environments.
• Review Terraform modules and CI/CD pipelines with DevOps engineers.
• Produce forward delivery plans and technical decision registers.

Skills

years of experience in infrastructure,

Cloud architecture

English proficiency

stakeholder management

US overlap

Tools

Terraform

Azure DevOps

GitHub Actions

Azure Migrate

Azure Arc

VMware vSphere/vSAN

Azure Local/Azure Stack HCI

Job description

Remote - EU

We’re looking for aSenior Cloud Architect to join our team on a large-scale application migration and modernization program for a major US enterprise organization.
The initiative focuses on migrating a complex enterprise application portfolio from VMware-based data centers to Microsoft Azure, including bothAzure-native services and Azure Local environments.
This is a senior, hands-on architecture role. You will lead application portfolio assessment, migration disposition and dependency analysis, target architecture design, migration wave planning, and application-level migration designs. You will work closely with DevOps Engineers, QA, Delivery Management, and client platform, network, security, database, and application teams.
The role is delivery-focused: you will not only define architecture but also produce the actual migration designs and deliverables required to move applications successfully.

Project Overview

The program involves assessing and migrating a large enterprise application and virtual machine estate from VMware-based infrastructure toward Azure.
The initiative focuses on:

• Application Portfolio Assessment: analyzing applications, infrastructure, dependencies, criticality, and migration readiness
• Migration Strategy: determining appropriate migration dispositions such as retain, retire, rehost, replatform, refactor, or rebuild
• Dependency & Affinity Analysis: identifying application dependencies and defining logical migration move groups
• Migration Wave Planning: sequencing applications according to dependencies, complexity, criticality, capacity, and change windows
• Azure & Azure Local Architecture: designing appropriate target architectures across cloud-native and hybrid environments
• Network Transition: defining networking, firewall, routing, load-balancing, and DNS changes required during migration
• Resilience & Disaster Recovery: designing application-level availability, backup, replication, and recovery strategies
• Migration Industrialization: ensuring designs can be implemented through existing Terraform and CI/CD tooling

Technology Landscape

Primary Cloud: Microsoft Azure
Hybrid Cloud: Azure Local / Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc
Source Platform: VMware vSphere / vSAN
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
CI/CD: Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions
Networking: Azure VNet, NSG, Azure Firewall, Load Balancer, Application Gateway, ExpressRoute, VPN, DNS
Identity & Security: Microsoft Entra ID, RBAC, Managed Identities, Key Vault
Observability: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics
Migration & Recovery: Azure Migrate, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup
Modernization: AKS, Azure App Service, managed databases
Secondary Cloud: AWS

Responsibilities

• Lead assessment of enterprise application and virtual machine portfolios and normalize discovery and assessment data.
• Identify missing or unreliable information and maintain a structured data-gap register.
• Facilitate disposition workshops with application owners and technical stakeholders.
• Define migration dispositions including retain, retire, rehost, replatform, refactor, and rebuild.
• Develop and calibrate application complexity scoring and T-shirt sizing models.
• Analyze technology footprints across databases, middleware, application servers, operating systems, and infrastructure platforms.
• Identify application modernization and containerization opportunities.
• Validate application dependencies and affinity groups using discovery data and technical analysis.
• Define migration move groups and wave plans considering criticality, dependencies, capacity, and change-freeze windows.
• Design target architectures for applications migrating to Azure-native and Azure Local environments.
• Define network transition patterns covering IP addressing, VLAN/VNet/subnet assignments, firewall rules, routing, load balancing, and DNS.
• Define resilience and recovery strategies based on application criticality.
• Evaluate application-native resilience patterns such as database replication, clustering, and cross-site load balancing.
• Define cloud-native recovery patterns using Azure Availability Zones, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, and related services.
• Review application migration designs before implementation.
• Contribute to migration runbooks, rollback criteria, validation frameworks, and cutover strategies.
• Review Terraform modules and CI/CD pipelines together with DevOps Engineers to ensure architecture designs are implementable through the client’s existing toolchain.
• Produce forward delivery plans, migration waves, move groups, and technical decision registers.
• Own architecture and migration-design deliverables through client review and acceptance.
• Present and defend technical decisions with enterprise architecture, network, security, database, platform, and application teams.

Candidate Requirements

Must-have

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure, cloud, platform engineering, or related disciplines.
• 3+ years working as a Cloud Architect, Solution Architect, or Technical Lead on cloud or data-center migration programs.
• Hands-on experience delivering at least one significant VMware-to-Azure or VMware-to-hybrid-cloud migration.
• Experience with large application or infrastructure estates, ideally 100+ applications or 1,000+ VMs.
• Strong Microsoft Azure architecture expertise.
• Practical experience with application portfolio assessment and migration disposition modeling.
• Experience with 6R-style migration strategies and application migration decision frameworks.
• Strong experience with dependency analysis, affinity grouping, move-group planning, and migration wave planning.
• Experience developing migration complexity models and T-shirt sizing.
• Hands-on experience with Azure Migrate or comparable enterprise migration tooling.
• Strong understanding of Azure networking, including VNets, NSGs, Azure Firewall, load balancing, private DNS, ExpressRoute, and VPN.
• Strong understanding of identity and access management using Microsoft Entra ID, RBAC, and managed identities.
• Working knowledge of Azure Local / Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc.
• Solid understanding of VMware vSphere and vSAN environments.
• Strong enterprise networking knowledge covering IP addressing, VLANs, subnets, routing, firewalls, load balancing, and DNS.
• Experience designing application resilience and disaster-recovery strategies.
• Working knowledge of Windows Server and Linux.
• Sufficient knowledge of Oracle, SQL Server, and enterprise middleware to make informed migration and modernization decisions.
• Ability to understand Terraform code and Azure DevOps/GitHub pipelines and ensure designs are implementable through an existing client-owned toolchain.
• Experience producing client-ready architecture diagrams, migration registers, scoring models, and technical design documents.
• Strong stakeholder-management and workshop-facilitation skills.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Ability to work with distributed teams and directly engage with US-based enterprise clients.
• Availability to maintain meaningful overlap with US business hours and occasionally support planned migration or cutover windows outside standard working hours.

Nice-to-have

• Hands-on AWS architecture or migration experience, including EC2, VPC, IAM, AWS Application Migration Service, and Direct Connect.
• Production experience with Azure Local.
• Experience with AKS or Kubernetes.
• Application modernization experience beyond simple rehosting.
• Experience migrating workloads toward Azure PaaS or managed database services.
• Experience reducing legacy Oracle, middleware, or infrastructure footprints.
• Experience in highly regulated industries such as energy, utilities, financial services, healthcare, or the public sector.
• Experience working under formal change-management and change-freeze processes.
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305).
• TOGAF or similar architecture certification.
• AWS architecture certification.

AI Engineering Mindset

We expect senior technical professionals to actively use modern AI-assisted engineering tools to improve delivery quality and productivity.
Practical use of AI for architecture analysis, documentation, Terraform/code review, troubleshooting, migration planning, and technical research is strongly encouraged.
Candidates should be comfortable incorporating AI-assisted workflows while maintaining appropriate engineering review, security, and quality controls.

Engagement Model

You will work as part of a small cross-functional delivery team typically consisting of:

• Delivery Manager
• Cloud Architect
• DevOps Engineers
• QA / Test Automation Engineer

The engagement follows a fixed-scope, fixed-timeline delivery model, requiring strong ownership, pragmatic decision-making, and close collaboration with client teams.
The role is remote, with working-hour overlap with US-based client teams.

Why Work With Us?

Our Culture

• Open communication and a focus on psychological safety
• Recognition of achievements and contributions
• Collaboration across multicultural and distributed teams
• Less bureaucracy, more focus on results
• Exposure to complex enterprise cloud-transformation initiatives
• Opportunity to influence architecture and migration decisions on large-scale programs

Hiring Process

• Intro / Pre-screen Call
• Technical Interview
• Manager Interview
• Pre-offer Stage + Reference Check (if requested)
• Official Offer