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Stefanini Group is looking for Principal AWS Solution Architect - Cloud Advisory & Escalation for a globally recognized company! For interested applicants, click the apply button or you may reach out to Alfher Hidalgo at (248) 728-2627/Alfher.Hidalgo@stefanini.com for faster processing. Thank you! Role: Principal AWS Solution Architect - Cloud Advisory & Escalation, Stefanini North America Hiring driver: Siemens AWS Cloud Architecture & Engineering Retainer (Desigo CC building management platform, distributed retail estate) plus the wider Cloud & Infrastructure advisory pipeline STEFANINI North America | Cloud & Infrastructure Practice Principal AWS Solution Architect Cloud Advisory & Escalation     Practice Cloud & Infrastructure, Stefanini North America Reports to Director, Presales Solution Architecture Location United States - remote, with occasional client travel Travel Limited. Expected under 15%, primarily for client workshops and architecture review boards Employment type Full-time. Open to qualified subcontract and contract-to-hire candidates through approved vendor partners Engagement model Advisory retainer delivery across three to five concurrent enterprise accounts, plus presales solution support Alternate titles Senior AWS Solutions Architect · Principal Cloud Architect · AWS Cloud Advisory Architect Posting date August 17, 2026 1. Summary Stefanini North America is hiring a Principal AWS Solution Architect to serve as the senior technical advisor of record for enterprise clients who operate their own AWS environments and need architectural judgment, escalation depth, and strategic direction they do not have in-house. This is a consulting and advisory role, not a build role. You will not be the person provisioning infrastructure day to day. You will be the person a client's operations team calls when the decision is architectural, the change is significant, the incident is serious, or the cost curve has started bending the wrong way. Your influence comes from judgment, written clarity, and earned trust rather than from administrative control of the environment. 2. Responsibilities 2.1 Strategic advisory and architecture ownership Serve as the named lead architect of record for assigned advisory accounts, maintaining relationship and technical continuity across the full engagement term rather than rotating in and out.Own the architectural decision record for each account - decisions taken, alternatives considered, rationale, trade-offs accepted, and the conditions under which a decision should be revisited.Lead formal AWS Well-Architected Reviews across all pillars, and convert findings into a prioritized, effort-estimated remediation backlog the client can actually sequence and fund. A flat findings list is not an acceptable output.Develop and maintain multi-year technical roadmaps that account for the client's commercial model and delivery constraints, not only the technically ideal end state.Provide architectural direction on scalability, resiliency, high availability, and disaster recovery for stateful enterprise workloads, including recovery objective definition and recovery test design.Provide network architecture direction for hybrid and widely distributed estates - transit and routing domain design, private and site connectivity at scale, and segmentation patterns appropriate where operational technology and information technology environments meet.Conduct security architecture assessments covering identity and access design, network segmentation, administrative access patterns, detection and response tooling, and overall posture.Lead cloud financial management work: cost allocation and tagging strategy, commitment planning, and unit-economics modelling - including per-site or per-unit cost models where a client resells a cloud-hosted service to their own customers.Review infrastructure-as-code strategy, module structure, state management, pipeline design, and drift control, and advise on improvement. 2.2 Client consulting and relationship Act as the single point of technical trust for each assigned account, at both engineering and executive level.Translate architecture into commercial consequence. You will be expected to explain to a non-technical executive why an architectural choice affects margin, risk, or contractual commitment, in language that survives being repeated to their own leadership without you in the room.Deliver unwelcome recommendations without damaging the relationship. A meaningful part of this role is telling a client that what they want to do is a mistake and remaining the person, they call next time.Run design and review sessions with the client's own engineers present, deliberately building their capability rather than creating dependency on you.Scope discrete project work into short written work orders with hour estimates, approved by the client before work begins.Manage retainer consumption transparently - forecast burn-down, flag exhaustion risk in the month it becomes visible, and never let a client be surprised by their own consumption.Chair recurring architecture review boards and monthly operating reviews with client technical and commercial stakeholders. 2.3 Escalation and incident leadership Participate in a senior escalation rotation, including on-call coverage for severity-one events on accounts contracted for twenty-four-hour response.Take technical command on incident bridges in environments you do not operate. This is a distinct and uncommon skill. You will be advising a client's operations team under time pressure, with incomplete information, no administrative authority, and a commercial relationship at stake.Lead root cause analysis after significant incidents and produce written analysis suitable for the client to share with their own customers and executives.Provide standby and guidance during critical maintenance windows and major change implementations.Maintain enough working familiarity with each account's environment that an escalation does not begin with an orientation session. 2.4 Written deliverables This role produces documents. Written output is a primary deliverable, not an administrative afterthought, and the quality of it is a substantial part of how performance is assessed. Current-state architecture documentation and diagrams.Well-Architected Review findings reports with prioritized remediation roadmaps.Escalation runbooks and responsibility matrices (RACI: responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) agreed jointly with client operations teams.Cost and unit-economics models with scaling forecasts.Root cause analyses and post-incident reports.Every deliverable is written to be owned and used by the client's team after the engagement, not to demonstrate the author's expertise. 2.5 Practice development and presales Support presales pursuits as senior technical authority: discovery calls, solution shaping, technical proposal content, effort estimation, and client-facing technical presentations.Contribute reusable intellectual property to the Cloud & Infrastructure practice - reference architectures, assessment frameworks, questionnaires, estimation models, and delivery accelerators.Serve as named backup architect on peer accounts, attending their governance sessions so that continuity coverage across the practice is real rather than nominal.Mentor mid-level cloud engineers and architects through design review, pairing, and structured feedback.Contribute to hyperscaler partner relationships, including funding program qualification and partner competency requirements. Your first 90 days So those expectations are concrete on both sides:     Period What success looks like Days 1-30 Onboarded to the anchor account. Current-state architecture documented, Well-Architected Review underway, escalation runbook and responsibility matrix drafted with the client's operations lead, and the first cost baseline established. You are the recognized point of technical contact by day thirty. Days 31-60 Well-Architected findings delivered as a prioritized, estimated remediation roadmap the client has accepted. Governance cadence running. First project work order scoped and approved. Supporting at least one active presales pursuit. Days 61-90 Steady-state advisory established on the anchor account. Second account onboarded or in transition to you. At least one reusable practice asset contributed. Client has, in their own words, told us the engagement is worth what they are paying for it. 4. Required qualifications     Area Requirement Total experience Twelve or more years in enterprise IT infrastructure, architecture, or engineering. AWS experience Seven or more years designing, architecting, and supporting production AWS environments at enterprise scale. Consulting experience Five or more years in a client-facing consulting, professional services, or advisory capacity - an internal architecture role alone is not sufficient preparation for this position. Core AWS depth Demonstrable architectural depth across AWS networking, security, identity and access management, monitoring and observability, compute, storage, and database services. Networking Hybrid and distributed network architecture - transit and routing design, site-to-site and private connectivity, network segmentation, and the operational limits of each pattern at scale. Resiliency Designing high availability and disaster recovery for stateful workloads, including Windows Server and relational database estates. Familiarity with database-level availability and replication patterns. Security Identity federation, least-privilege access design, credential-free administrative access patterns, and security posture assessment. Cost management Practical cloud financial management experience - allocation, tagging strategy, commitment planning, and cost modelling. Comfort with unit economics is strongly preferred. Infrastructure as code Working fluency sufficient to review and critique an infrastructure-as-code estate. You do not need to be the primary author, but you must be able to tell good from bad and say why. Distributed estates Experience supporting environments spanning many physical locations, where wide-area connectivity is a primary availability concern. Mission-critical context Experience in regulated, clinical, industrial, or otherwise mission-critical environments where downtime carries consequence beyond inconvenience. Communication Demonstrated ability to write client-facing technical documents and to present credibly to executive audiences. Work authorization Authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship. 5. Certifications 5.1 Required AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, current and in good standing. This certification is required. Candidates must be able to provide a verification link or digital badge confirming the credential is active and not expired. AWS certifications lapse after three years, and an expired credential does not meet this requirement. 5.2 Strongly preferred AWS Certified Advanced Networking - SpecialtyAWS Certified Security - Specialty Given that connectivity and security dominate the risk profile of the environments this role supports at least one of the two specialty certifications above materially strengthens a candidacy. 5.3 Additional credentials that add value AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - ProfessionalFinOps Certified Practitioner or FinOps Certified ProfessionalProfessional-level certification in a second cloud platform - Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Our clients are rarely single-cloud and multi-cloud fluency is genuinely useful here.TOGAF or comparable enterprise architecture certificationCISSP or comparable security certificationITIL 4 Foundation - relevant to escalation, incident, and change discipline in client operating environments A note on certifications generally. The Professional-level AWS certification is a threshold, not a differentiator. It confirms you have the vocabulary. It does not tell us whether you can hold an incident bridge, write a document a client will act on, or tell a client something they do not want to hear. Those are what we will actually assess. 6. Education Bachelor's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.Master's degree in a technical or business discipline is a plus but is not expected and carries no advantage over equivalent depth of experience.Equivalent professional experience is accepted in place of a degree. For a role at this level, twelve years of demonstrated architectural work is stronger evidence than a qualification earned two decades ago. Candidates without a degree should not be screened out on that basis, and vendors should not filter on it. 7. Consulting and advisory competencies These are assessed as rigorously as the technical requirements. They are the difference between a strong architect and a strong advisor, and this role needs the second.     Competency What we are looking for Executive presence Credible with a client's CIO and equally credible with their network engineer, adjusting register without changing substance. Written clarity Able to produce a document that a client acts on without a follow-up call to explain it. We assess this directly through a writing sample. Judgment under ambiguity Comfortable making a defensible recommendation on incomplete information, stating the assumptions explicitly, and revising publicly when they prove wrong. Constructive disagreement Able to tell a client their plan is a mistake, hold that position under pressure, and preserve the relationship. Commercial awareness Understands that the client has a business model, a contract, and a margin, and that the best architecture is the one that serves those - not the most sophisticated one available. Restraint Knows when not to re-architect. Recognizes that a working system with known flaws is often the correct answer, and can distinguish genuine risk from personal preference. This is the clearest marker of seniority we look for. Composure in incidents Calm, structured, and directive on a bridge call. Establishes what is known, what is assumed, and what to do next, without adding pressure to a team already under it. Capability transfer Measures success partly by whether the client needs you less over time, and is comfortable with that. 8. Screening questions for vendor partners Please use these to qualify candidates before submission. A candidate who cannot answer these substantively is not a fit for this role, regardless of certification profile, and submitting them wastes everyone's time including theirs. Describe an incident bridge you led in a client environment your own team did not operate. What did you do in the first fifteen minutes, and what did you deliberately not do?Describe a time you recommended against so