AWS Platform Architect

Immediate need for a talented AWS Platform Architect & Lead. This is a 12+ months contract opportunity with long-term potential and is located in Canada (Remote).

Job ID: 26-31157

Pay Range: $80/hr - $83/hour.

Key Responsibilities:

• Platform Foundation & Infrastructure
• Own and evolve the AWS multi-account architecture: account vending, AWS Control Tower governance, SCPs, and organizational unit design that enforces workload and identity boundaries.
• Design and operate the core networking layer — VPCs, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, Direct Connect, and segmentation policies that all workloads inherit.
• Build and maintain a centralized IaC module library (Terraform and/or AWS CDK): versioned, opinionated primitives covering compute, networking, storage, security, and observability that product and engineering teams consume directly.
• Establish and enforce platform-wide security baselines: IAM role design, permission boundaries, KMS key hierarchy, secrets management patterns, and zero-trust network posture.
• Own the platform FinOps strategy — Reserved Instance and Savings Plan coverage, cost allocation tagging, chargeback models, and automated rightsizing.
• Drive CI/CD and GitOps strategy for infrastructure delivery, ensuring consistent, auditable, and selfservice deployment patterns across all environments.
• Runtime Patterns & Reference Implementations
• Define and own runtime execution patterns for the platform: containerized workloads (EKS/ECS/Fargate), serverless (Lambda), and the scaling, lifecycle, and deployment standards that govern them.
• Build orchestration infrastructure supporting complex, multi-step workloads: workflow engines, event-driven triggers (EventBridge, SQS, Step Functions), and inter-service coordination patterns.
• Design data persistence and state management strategies across the platform — covering relational, NoSQL, caching, and object storage — with clear guidance on when to use each.
• Develop and publish canonical reference implementations: production-ready patterns for common workload types that engineering teams clone, adapt, and own — reducing time-to-production and ensuring architectural consistency.
• Standardize integration patterns across the platform: service connectivity, authentication flows, API gateway configurations, and cross-account access models.
• Partner with application and product engineering teams to translate workload requirements into reusable platform capabilities, so new use cases can be onboarded without custom platform work.
• Team Leadership & Engineering Culture
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of platform engineers, setting technical direction, running design and code reviews, and building a high-bar engineering culture.
• Drive the RFC and architectural review process across both foundational and runtime platform domains.
• Champion a self-service platform model — application teams should be able to deploy and operate workloads without requiring platform team intervention for every request.
• Serve as the primary technical authority for platform-layer decisions across engineering, security, and product stakeholders.
• Partner with recruiting to attract and assess platform engineering talent. Security, Observability & Reliability
• Implement observability standards across the full platform stack: infrastructure metrics, distributed tracing, log aggregation, and alerting that gives teams operational confidence.
• Ensure all platform layers meet security and compliance requirements — audit trails, data residency controls, encryption standards, and access governance.
• Own platform-layer incident response: on-call rotation structure, runbook standards, and a blameless post-mortem culture.
• Define and track platform SLOs and reliability targets, with clear escalation paths when services degrade.

Key Requirements and Technology Experience:

• Must have skills: - AWS, Infrastructure, Architect/Lead
• 10+ years of progressive experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or solutions architecture.
• 5+ years of dedicated, hands-on AWS experience designing and operating production systems at enterprise scale.
• 3+ years in a technical lead or peop