Principal Platform Architecture

Principal, Platform Architecture

Seeking a candidate with strong hands-on technical experience in GitOps Architecture, Argo CD, Kubernetes Architecture.

SALARY:
$175k
- $220 flex plus 30% bonus.

LOCATION:
Chicago, IL Hybrid 3 days onsite. Open to H1B. Platform architecture
- infrastructure, cloud, networking, storage, observability tooling, Kubernetes. This is a hands-on architecture role with enterprise-wide impact. Define and Own Platform Architecture Lead architecture design and decision-making for core platform capabilities: container orchestration, streaming infrastructure, cloud architecture, CI/CD and GitOps pipelines, and observability Develop and maintain target-state platform architectures with clear transition plans from current state Own reference architectures for Kubernetes-based workloads, Kafka streaming topologies, Flink stream processing, and AWS infrastructure patterns Establish platform architecture standards and guardrails that application teams can build against reliably Ensure non-functional requirements
- availability, latency, throughput, recoverability
- are addressed at the platform level, not delegated to individual application teams Drive Platform Modernization Architect and guide migration of workloads to cloud-native patterns on AWS, including compute, networking, storage, and security services Define GitOps model
- infrastructure-as-code practices, pipeline standards, environment promotion, and configuration management at scale Evaluate and recommend platform technologies and tooling; lead proof-of-concept efforts to validate architectural decisions before commitment Identify and reduce platform risk across the portfolio
- single points of failure, unsupported dependencies, capacity constraints, and operational gaps Qualifications Required 10+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture roles with demonstrated ownership of enterprise-scale platform decisions Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes
- cluster architecture, workload design, networking, security, and operational patterns at scale Hands-on experience architecting Apache Kafka deployments
- topic design, partitioning strategy, consumer group patterns, schema management, and operational concerns Practical experience with Apache Flink or equivalent stream processing frameworks
- job design, state management, and deployment on Kubernetes Strong AWS architecture experience
- VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, networking, and security services Demonstrated experience designing and implementing GitOps pipelines
- infrastructure-as-code, environment promotion, secrets management, and release automation using tools such as Flux, ArgoCD, Terraform, or Helm Experience with brownfield/legacy environments alongside cloud-native programs Ability to produce clear, comprehensive architecture artifacts: diagrams, ADRs, reference architectures, and transition plans Strong communication skills
- able to present platform decisions to executive audiences and work through technical trade-offs with engineering teams