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Retainer Remote Jobs in Michigan (NOW HIRING)

Retainer Remote information

What is a retainer remote?

A Retainer Remote job is a type of employment arrangement where a professional works remotely for a client or company on a retainer basis. This means the worker is paid a fixed fee regularly (such as monthly) to be available for a set amount of work or hours, rather than being compensated per project or by the hour. The remote aspect allows the worker to perform their duties from any location, providing flexibility for both the employee and employer. Such positions are common in consulting, legal, marketing, and creative fields where ongoing support is needed. Retainer remote jobs offer stability for workers and predictable costs for clients.

How does communication typically work for remote employees on a retainer basis?

Remote employees working on a retainer basis usually rely on consistent digital communication tools such as email, project management software, and video conferencing to stay connected with their clients or teams. Regular check-ins, status updates, and clear expectations around availability are key to ensuring smooth collaboration. Since tasks may be project-based or ongoing, establishing a structured workflow and clear deliverables helps both parties stay aligned, even without in-person meetings.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a retainer remote, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Retainer Remote professional, you need specialized expertise in your field, a proven track record, and relevant education or certification depending on your industry. Familiarity with remote collaboration tools such as Slack, Zoom, project management systems, and secure file-sharing platforms is typically required. Exceptional self-motivation, time management, and communication skills are essential for building trust and maintaining clear client relationships remotely. These skills ensure that deliverables meet client expectations, foster long-term partnerships, and enable success in a flexible, independent work environment.

What is the difference between Retainer Remote vs Freelance Remote Designer?

AspectRetainer RemoteFreelance Remote Designer
CredentialsDesign certifications, portfolioDesign certifications, portfolio
Work EnvironmentOngoing client relationship, steady workProject-based, variable workload
Employer UsageCompanies seeking consistent design supportClients hiring for specific projects
Search/Comparison IntentRetainer Remote vs Freelance Designer

Retainer Remote professionals work on ongoing contracts with clients, providing continuous support and maintaining a steady workflow. Freelance Remote Designers typically work on individual projects, with flexible schedules and varying workloads. The main difference lies in the commitment level and work structure, with retainers offering stability and freelancers offering project-based flexibility.

What are the most commonly searched types of Retainer jobs in Michigan?

The most popular types of Retainer jobs in Michigan are:

What cities in Michigan are hiring for Retainer Remote jobs?

Cities in Michigan with the most Retainer Remote job openings:

Principal AWS Solution Architect Cloud Advisory & Escalation

Southfield, MI • Remote

Stefanini Group
IT Services • 10K+ employees

Contractor

Posted 9 days ago


Job description

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 - Specialty
  • AWS 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 - Professional
  • FinOps Certified Practitioner or FinOps Certified Professional
  • Professional-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 certification
  • CISSP or comparable security certification
  • ITIL 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...