Principal Cloud Architect - AWS

Innovation Hub Overview 

Jefferies is creating a Technology Innovation Hub in Pune, a greenfield opportunity to build the systems that power global markets. As our first India technology center, this hub brings together hands on builders who engineer the platforms behind Jefferies’ growth across capital markets, investment banking, and institutional securities. We’re scaling toward an elite team of 500 engineers while maintaining the agility, ownership, and meritocratic spirit that defines Jefferies. From cloud and data to AI, risk, and core business technologies, teams in Pune will lead high impact work with a global mandate.

Team Overview

IT Infrastructure Technology 

Jefferies’ IT Infrastructure Technology team builds and runs the core technology backbone that enables the firm to operate globally. It covers enterprise infrastructure engineering and operations while driving modernization initiatives such as Cloud Adoption and Network Resiliency. The group supports critical platforms including networking, end-user computing, cloud, databases, server/Unix engineering, communications, and global data centers (including low-latency colocations near exchanges). 

Role summary

Shape the technical vision and architecture standards for our AWS cloud infrastructure. As Principal Cloud Architect, you will design enterprise-grade, resilient, and secure cloud solutions, establish architectural guardrails, and provide expert consultation to engineering teams across the organization. You will drive adoption of best practices in multi-region architectures, disaster recovery, security, cost optimization, and observability while ensuring alignment with business goals and regulatory requirements.

You will collaborate extensively with Engineering, Cloud Security, Networking, Identity Teams, Database, Unix, and business line technology all divisions. You will serve as a trusted advisor to senior technology and business leaders, balancing innovation with risk management. Strong interpersonal skills, customer service orientation, and executive presence are essential

 Key responsibilities 

• Define and evolve cloud architecture standards and reference designs for AWS infrastructure, with future consideration for Azure and GCP
• Design highly resilient, secure, and cost-optimized cloud-native and multi-region solutions for production workloads supporting all business lines
• Provide architectural consultation and review for complex cloud projects; ensure production-readiness through fault tolerance design, blast-radius reduction, DR/HA patterns, and clear SLO definition
• Establish and enforce architectural guardrails using Terraform Enterprise policies, AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs), and other governance mechanisms
• Partner with Engineering, Cloud Security, Networking, Database, Unix, and Identity teams to drive cross-functional architectural decisions  
• Lead architecture review boards; evaluate technical proposals, assess risk, and provide recommendations on technology choices
• Drive adoption of cloud computing best practices: containers, serverless architectures, microservices, event-driven patterns, and API-first design
• Champion security-by-design principles: implement secure architectures for private and public-facing systems, ensure IAM/RBAC best practices, and maintain compliance with regulatory standards
• Conduct capacity planning and performance analysis; optimize architectures for cost, scale, and latency
• Mentor engineers and architects; contribute to team knowledge sharing through documentation, presentations, and design
• Provide strategic input on cloud platform roadmap and vendor evaluation

 Requirements

• 8+ years in cloud infrastructure, solution architecture, or platform engineering with 5+ years in AWS architecture roles
• AWS Solutions Architect Professional and/or AWS DevOps Professional certification required; specialty certifications (Security, Generative AI Developer) strongly preferred 
• Deep expertise designing resilient, secure, and operable systems: availability zones, multi-region architectures, DR patterns, autoscaling, cost-aware design
• Strong experience with AWS services across compute (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda), networking (VPC, Transit Gateway, Route53, CloudFront), storage (S3, EBS, EFS), databases (RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora), and security (IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, GuardDuty 
• Proven ability to design and implement secure architectures for private and internet-facing systems 
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes (EKS), containerization, and microservices architectures
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, and cloud security best practices 
• Excellent communication skills; ability to present complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and influence decision-making at senior levels
• Proficiency using GenAI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub Copilot) for architecture design exploration, documentation generation, and technical review
• Ability to architect and govern AI agent-driven automation (agentic workflows) at enterprise scale: define frameworks for human-in-the-loop controls, logging/auditability, policy guardrails, rollback mechanisms, and secure secrets management
• Strategic mindset to identify architectural patterns that reduce operational toil; champion automation initiatives that measurably improve engineering productivity
• Provide architectural guidance during major incidents; participate in post-incident reviews to identify systemic improvements
• Establish and review architecture SLOs and non-functional requirements
• Contribute to runbook development and operational readiness 
• Support on-call escalation as needed for architectural consultation during critical outages
• Maintain comprehensive architecture documentation, decision records (ADRs), and design patterns

Preferred

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or equivalent
• Experience with Azure or GCP architectures for multi-cloud strategy
• Background in software development or systems programming
• Familiarity with FinOps principles and cloud cost optimization frameworks
• Experience with observability and APM tools (e.g. Splunk)

We have been made aware of bad actors falsely claiming to be associated with Jefferies Group soliciting individuals to attend virtual job interviews, complete online tests or courses and sending fictitious employment offer letters.

Please note that any email contact with Jefferies personnel will come from an “@jefferies.com” email address. Further, Jefferies will not notify shortlisted candidates through social media platforms (e.g. WhatsApp or Telegram) or ask candidates to make payment to participate in the hiring process.

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