Principal Cloud Architect

Overview of Role

66degrees is looking for creative, dedicated, and personable technology business professionals for a Principal Cloud Architect position. level. A Principal Cloud Architect is someone capable of designing complex, large-scale, and often "bleeding-edge" solutions. Our ideal candidate will display relentless curiosity and drive around how we organize ourselves and deploy/use technology to ensure our largest and most complex Enterprise clients IT environments drive business value. We are looking for the right fit with our growing team of Principal level Architects as we solve previously "unsolveable" problems with the scale of AI.

Responsibilities

• Build a trusted advisory relationship with strategic accounts and engage with CIO/CTO/VP IT and Business leaders   
• Architectural Strategy & Governance
• Design Global Scale Systems: Lead the end-to-end architectural design of multi-region, highly available cloud ecosystems that support millions of concurrent users and petabyte-scale data processing.
• Standardize Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Establish and enforce enterprise-wide standards for IaC and config management to ensure consistent, repeatable, and audited deployments across all environments.
• Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Orchestration: Architect complex connectivity and workload portability strategies using Anthos, Private Service Connect, and Cloud Interconnects to bridge legacy on-premises systems with modern cloud services.
• Advanced AI & Data Innovation
• Operationalize Generative AI: Design production-grade RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architectures, ensuring LLMs are secure, reliably operate within capacity constraints and quotas, monitor and control token costs, and implement Enterprise security grade guardrails.
• End-to-End MLOps: Scale the implementation of automated machine learning pipelines—from ingestion to model serving—using Vertex AI (or self-hosted oss models) to reduce the time-to-market for predictive insights.
• Security, Risk & Compliance
• Zero-Trust Leadership: Design and lead the implementation of comprehensive security frameworks including BeyondCorp, VPC Service Controls, and advanced Identity Management (IAM) to protect sensitive workloads against sophisticated threats.
• Regulatory Engineering: Architect technical controls that automate compliance for global standards (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR), ensuring the platform is "secure by design" and audit-ready at all times.
• Technical Leadership & Operational Excellence
• Complex Problem Resolution: Serve as the final technical escalation point for critical production issues, performing deep-root cause analysis on global-scale outages or performance bottlenecks.
• Financial Optimization (FinOps): Direct the cost-optimization strategy by designing high-efficiency architectures that balance performance requirements with long-term cloud spend sustainability.
• Cross-Functional Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier by mentoring other architects and engineering teams, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.
• Lead Consultant
• Act as a technical subject matter expert, particularly regarding the Google Cloud ecosystem for business users, providing clear and concise explanations of complex concepts. 
• Identify customer priorities, technical objections, and design strategies encompassing the Google ecosystem to deliver business growth and resolve blockers.
• Lead requirements gathering and project scoping.
• Solution design, problem-solving, and architecture diagramming. 
• Provide domain expertise around public cloud and enterprise technology, and effectively promote Google Cloud with clients, at conferences, and online.
• Provide technical expertise to the team on continuous integration/continuous delivery, infrastructure, monitoring, alerting, and security.
• Provide recommendations on integration strategies, enterprise architectures, platforms, and application infrastructure needed to implement a complete solution for clients.
• Assist in delivering technical solutions to meet customer functional needs and improve service reliability, including CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure builds/migrations.
• Provide Engineer-to-Engineer and Architect-to-Engineer support, including whiteboard sessions and informal Q&A.
• Travel to customer sites, conferences, and other related events as required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of GCP experience is a must. Experience in other clouds is beneficial.
• Proven experience in building, architecting, designing, and implementing globally distributed cloud-based systems, with a strong understanding of API-first design principles and API management platforms.
• Extensive experience with security (zero trust) and networking in cloud environments
• Capable of advising and implementing CI/CD practices to clients using tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Cloud Build, and Cloud Deploy and concepts such as GitOps and GitFlow.
• Experience in containerizing workloads using Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and Artifact Registry.
• Knowledge of technology solutions and ability to learn emerging technologies, methodologies, and solutions in the Cloud/IT technology space.
• Ability to work cross-functionally, engage and influence audiences.
• Excellent organizational skills and customer-facing communication.
• Proficiency in documentation and knowledge transfer using remote meetings, written documents, and technical diagrams slide decks.
• Experience in implementing hybrid connectivity using VPN or Cloud Interconnect is a plus.
• GCP Credentials:  Professional Cloud Architect Certification plus any other Professional Cert (Data Engineer preferred) or L400 Generative AI skill badge.  Additional certifications Kubernetes (CKA, CKS), or Terraform strongly recommended
• A Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering, Data Science, Information Technology, Business Intelligence, Computer Science, or a related field.