Principal Cloud Architect - Heyworth, United States - Blue Cross Blue Shield companies

Description

Job Description Summary

The Principal Cloud Architect will lead the engineering and operational strategy for cloud architecture, focusing on AWS cloud native and hybrid cloud data solutions, analytics, and AI/ML applications for our Blue Systems of Intelligence (BSI) cloud-native data platform.

Key Responsibilities:

- Serve as the technical lead of the BSI Platform Operations team.

- Develop and maintain the strategy, roadmap, and design for our cloud architecture.

- Be hands-on with the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) CI/CD stack, adhering to enterprise enablement standards, proposing improvements to operational readiness, as well as overall development practices, coding standards, and data engineering processes.

- Ensure cross-platform integration (Databricks and Snowflake) and adherence to AWS well-architected principles.

- Provide guidance to various IT areas using Agile/SAFe methodology, with a focus on continuous cloud solution delivery for the BSI platform.

- Drive decision-making and operational strategy in collaboration with Enterprise Architecture, Information Security (InfoSec), the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), the Architecture Working Group (AWG), and technology partners such as AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, and other Service Integrators.

This role requires a blend of hands-on technical expertise and leadership skills. This role will bring a strong understanding of cloud architecture, data solutions, and be adept at steering technical teams and influencing key business decisions.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

Hands-On Technical Leadership for Cloud-Native Solutions: Actively engage in the design, implementation, and maintenance of the AWS cloud native and hybrid cloud data solutions, analytics, and AI/ML applications for our BSI cloud-native data platform. Be a hands-on leader, coach, and mentor with a cloud operations team, and develop expertise with the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) CI/CD stack, establish development practices, coding standards, and data engineering best practices. Ensure cross-platform integration and adherence to AWS Well-Architected Principles. Create data/transition architectures that map to future state enterprise cloud strategy and solutions. Provide architecture leadership for cloud-native data platform design and modernization of existing data solutions.

Strategic Cloud Operations & Architecture: Define and communicate data platform operations vision and strategy, application migration/transformation roadmap. Analyze enterprise business drivers to develop operational requirements. Assess current state architecture, recommend future state architecture using cloud technologies, and develop reusable technical reference architectures.

Establish governance models, processes, best practices, and standards that enhance the security and operational effectiveness of the cloud ecosystem. Lead cost optimization and estimation discussions. Contribute to granular cost allocation, develop charge-back model and reporting, budgeting & forecasting cloud/SaaS spend, identify cloud resource inefficiencies. Provide guidance to architects, CCoE, CPE, software engineers and other IT areas using agile/SAFe methodology, with focus on continuous cloud solution delivery. Work with Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Data Services, Cloud Platform Engineering, Cloud Center of Excellence, InfoSec, and partners (AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, other Service Integrators) etc. to transform, plan, align, define, review architecture, strategy, roadmaps and design artifacts.

Required Education, Certifications and Experience

• Bachelor's Degree in computer or systems engineering related major
• 10 years Architecture experience related to transforming and modernizing enterprise data applications, creating architecture and design for high-volume, low-latency, and resilient cloud applications in AWS, Snowflake and DataBricks.
• 10 years Data warehousing experience
• 5 years AWS Architecture, design and build experience
• 5 years Hybrid and cloud-native data platform design and implementation experience
• 3 years Snowflake Architecture, Design and Development
• 2 years Databricks Platform Experience
• experience architecting, integrating and designing data applications and systems using cloud based big data technologies including Snowflake, AWS EMR, AWS Kinesis, Spark/Pyspark, EC2, lambda, DMS, Sagemaker, ELB, AWS Glue/Glue Data Catalog, Athena, Lake formation, DataSync, EBS, S3, EMR, RDS, DynamoDB, Amazon MWAA, Route 53, EKS and other services related to cloud security.
• Experience related to Databricks Data Processing, Delta Lake, Snowflake Data Warehousing, Data Sharing, Security, Analytics and Snowflake/AWS/Databricks integration
• Experience with conducting detailed assessment of applications, workloads, and technology landscape for cloud suitability, and develop business case and Cloud adoption roadmap.
• Experience performing detailed analysis of application cross sections, map to cloud functions and enable application migration to the cloud.
• Experience creating data/transition architectures that map to future state cloud strategy and solutions.
• Experience defining and document cloud processes and standards, reference architectures and influence the adoption of these.
• Experience defining and communicating application migration roadmap and gaining buy-in from across business and IT area leads.
• Experience providing assessment of current state architecture, recommendation of future state architecture using cloud technologies and developing reusable technical reference models to promote cloud adoption.
• Experience defining governance models, processes, best practices, and standards that promote the security and operational effectiveness of the cloud ecosystem.
• Experience providing architecture leadership for large scale migration of existing data center hosted applications to the cloud.
• Experience leading cost optimization and estimation discussions including usage analysis, Reserved Instance (RI) planning, technology infrastructure rightsizing, pricing models and buying strategies.
• Experience with data lakes, lake house architecture, and delta lake
• Experience applying cloud access security brokers (CASBs), common and industry standard cloud-native/cloud-friendly authentication mechanisms (OAuth, OpenID, SAML etc.)
• Experience to build scalable, resilient - highly available and disaster recoverable application in AWS
• Experience communicating project health and identify risks to project and program stakeholders, sponsors, and management
• Experience resolving conflicts between timeline, budget, and scope independently but intuitively escalate complex or consequential issues to management.
• Experience with application delivery through DevSecOps and agile development processes leveraging CI/CD pipelines.
• Skilled in driving Proof-of-Concepts and implementation, with hands-on involvement as SME, for new service items: build deployment automation pipelines, build automated next gen CI/CD pipelines partner with development teams, build and integrate new technologies and prevent cloud provider lock-in.
• Understanding of cost models for cloud services and experience evaluating ROI of proposed cloud architectures.
• Understanding of cloud security with focus on applying techniques for protecting sensitive (PHI/PII) data including encryption, masking, and tokenization.
• Knowledge and experience with relevant healthcare legal and regulatory requirements, such as HITRUST, SOC-2, HIPAA Privacy & Security and other CMS regulations and guidelines.
• Knowledge of best practices and market trends pertaining to Cloud to provide thought leadership and mentor team to build necessary competency.
• Must have high attention to detail, be well organized and be a self-starter.
• Must be able to work with limited direct supervision.

• Masters Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration or Management (preferred).