AWS Solution Architect (RARR Job 6396)

Role Summary

We are looking for a Principal AWS Solution Architect – Data & Analytics to serve as the technical authority and strategic leader for enterprise data platforms on AWS. This role is responsible for defining the long-term data & analytics architecture vision, establishing organization-wide standards, and guiding multiple teams and programs to deliver scalable, secure, and business-critical analytics solutions. This is a hands-on architecture leadership role, combining deep technical expertise with executive-level influence.

Role Scope & Impact

• Own enterprise-wide data & analytics architecture strategy on AWS
• Act as the final technical escalation point for complex data challenges
• Influence technology roadmap, investment decisions, and platform modernization
• Mentor Senior/Lead Architects and raise the overall architectural bar
• Partner closely with CIO/CTO, Data Office, Security, and Product leadership

Key Outcomes (Success Measures)

• Within 12–18 months, you will:
• Define and institutionalize a reference architecture for modern data platforms (lakehouse, streaming, analytics, ML-ready).
• Enable multiple business domains to adopt self-service, governed analytics at scale.
• Improve platform reliability, security posture, and cost efficiency across AWS data workloads.
• Standardize architecture patterns, guardrails, and best practices adopted across teams.
• Reduce delivery risk by proactively addressing architectural debt and scalability limits.

Responsibilities

Must to have

• Enterprise Architecture & Strategy
• Define the enterprise data & AI architecture vision aligned to business strategy.
• Own architectural standards for:
• Data lakes & lakehouse platforms
• Warehousing & analytical querying
• Streaming & real-time analytics
• Metadata, governance, and data sharing
• Evaluate and recommend build vs buy decisions and new AWS services or ecosystem tools.
• AWS Data Platform Architecture
• Design and govern solutions using AWS services such as:
• Storage & Lake: Amazon S3, AWS Lake Formation, Glue Data Catalog
• Processing: AWS Glue, EMR (Spark), Lambda, Step Functions
• Analytics: Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift (incl. Spectrum)
• Streaming: Amazon Kinesis, MSK (Kafka)
• AI - AWS sagemaker/bedrock
• Define best practices for:
• File formats (Parquet/ORC), partitioning, compression
• Table formats (Apache Iceberg / Hudi / Delta Lake, where applicable)
• Data modeling (dimensional, data vault, domain-oriented models)
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship
• Serve as principal technical reviewer for major initiatives and programs.
• Mentor architects and senior engineers; coach teams on architectural thinking.
• Drive architecture communities of practice, design forums, and knowledge sharing.
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Communicate complex architectural concepts to executive and non-technical audiences.
• Translate business objectives into scalable, future-proof data architectures.
• Influence roadmap prioritization and investment decisions.

Good to have

• Security, Governance & Compliance
• Establish enterprise-grade security architecture:
• IAM strategy, fine-grained data access, encryption with KMS
• Network isolation, private connectivity, cross-account patterns
• Drive governance frameworks for:
• Data cataloging, lineage, classification, and access control
• Regulatory compliance (PII, financial, or industry-specific constraints)
• Partner with Security and Risk teams to ensure alignment with enterprise policies.
• Reliability, Performance & Cost Excellence
• Embed AWS Well-Architected Framework principles into all data solutions.
• Lead performance optimization and cost management (FinOps) initiatives.
• Define observability standards for data pipelines and analytics workloads.

Required Qualifications (Must-Have)

• 12+ years in data, analytics, or platform engineering; 8+ years on AWS