Required Skills
- AWS
- Solution Architect
- IaC
- REST
- GraphQL
- DDD
- KAfka
- SQQS
- SNS
- DynamoDB
- IAM
- KMS
- WAF
- CDK
- Terraform
- Kinesis
Job Summary
Solution Architect
AWS | Microservices & Event-Driven Architecture
Cambridge - Hybrid - 2 days
The Opportunity
We're looking for an experienced Solution Architect to design and lead the implementation of scalable, cloud-native systems on AWS. You'll work across engineering, product and business stakeholders to define architecture for distributed microservices platforms powered by event-driven patterns - turning complex requirements into resilient, production-grade solutions. This is a high-impact, highly collaborative role. You'll be the technical authority on architecture decisions, shaping the standards and patterns engineering teams follow across the organisation.
What You'll Do
- Define end-to-end system architectures aligned to business goals, run architecture reviews and threat modelling sessions, and own the technical roadmap across multiple product domains.
- Lead service decomposition using Domain-Driven Design - defining bounded contexts, inter-service contracts, and REST/GraphQL/gRPC APIs - and set patterns for resilience (circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads) and observability (distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics).
- Design event streaming and async messaging using Kafka, Amazon SQS/SNS, EventBridge and Kinesis, including event schema standards, event sourcing, CQRS and saga orchestration.
- Design AWS infrastructure across EKS, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront and VPC networking, define IaC standards (Terraform and/or AWS CDK), and lead cloud migration and modernisation from on-premise to AWS.
- Partner with engineering leads, product managers and C-suite to align technical strategy with business objectives, presenting architecture proposals and trade-off analyses to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Embed security from day one (IAM, KMS, WAF, secrets management), design for reliability (multi-AZ, DR, SLAs/SLOs), and drive FinOps practices such as right-sizing and cost optimisation.
- Mentor and upskill senior engineers on architecture patterns and cloud-native practices.
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years in a dedicated architecture role.
- Deep AWS expertise across core compute, storage and networking services.
- Microservices design experience: DDD, API design, service mesh, resilience patterns.
- Hands-on with event-driven patterns - Kafka, SQS/SNS, EventBridge or Kinesis.
- Infrastructure as Code - Terraform and/or AWS CDK.
- Strong container experience - Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, ECS.
- Established CI/CD pipeline and DevOps practice experience.
- Excellent stakeholder communication - comfortable presenting to both engineers and executives.
Nice to Have
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional.
- Service mesh experience (Istio, AWS App Mesh, Linkerd).
- Data architecture: streaming pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes.
- Serverless-first architecture and Lambda-optimised design.
- Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud exposure.
- FinOps tooling (AWS Cost Explorer, Kubecost, CloudHealth).
- Track record mentoring senior engineering talent.
- Familiarity with zero-trust networking and advanced IAM patterns.
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AWS Solution Architect in Cambridge employer: Virtual Hire Staffing
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