Principal Cloud Security Architect

Key Impact Areas

• Executive Technical Leadership: Serves as a technical authority across portfolio and teams, leading strategic initiatives and establishing best practices that elevate the customers’ and company's technical posture.
• Strategic Innovation & Platform Modernization: Defines and executes long-term SRE, cloud-native, and Zero Trust strategies aligned to business objectives, driving organization-wide digital transformation with measurable outcomes.
• Zero Trust Architecture Leadership: Champions Zero Trust principles in all cloud platform designs and implementations, advising on secure, identity-centric architectures that scale across mission-critical applications and data workflows.
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Excellence: Establishes a Center of Excellence for SRE practices- instrumentation, observability, error budgets, SLIs/SLOs, toil reduction, etc. - and ensures alignment with GitOps and DevSecOps philosophies.
• Thought Leadership: Recognized as an expert in the Cloud Platform Engineering, Zero Trust, and Site Reliability Engineering fields, contributing to industry best practices, and influencing the broader community.
• Innovation and Impact: Drives significant innovation within the platform and contributes to the organization's strategic goals.
• Mentorship & Talent Development:Actively mentors senior SREs and rising technical leaders, cultivating a high-performing, collaborative SRE culture grounded in excellence, autonomy, and continuous learning.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the long-term vision for SRE and cloud platforms, aligning with the organization's strategic goals and anticipating future technology trends.
• Serve as technical lead on high-impact initiatives, including multi-cloud readiness, Zero Trust adoption, AI/ML enablement, and platform reliability.
• Lead the design and implementation of cloud-native CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and scalable observability platforms.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to transform engineering practices, adopting cutting-edge technologies and methodologies to enhance efficiency, scalability, and security.
• Build and mentor high-performing technical teams; instill a culture of engineering rigor, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement.
• Contribute to the broader SRE and cloud-native community through thought leadership, publications, presentations, open-source contributions, and participation in industry events.
• Drive strategic partnerships with cloud providers and other technology vendors to advance the organization's cloud strategy and influence the development of new technologies.
• Assess and guide adoption of emerging technologies, ensuring alignment between technical innovation and business value.

Candidates must have an active security clearance. 

GCP Skills:

• Deep expertise in GCP architecture, with proven leadership in building secure, scalable, and compliant environments.
• Skilled in deploying and operating Kubernetes (GKE), Cloud Run, Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP), and ZTA models.
• Mastery of infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi), GitOps (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux), and SRE observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Stackdriver, Grafana).
• Strong understanding of compliance frameworks (e.g., FedRAMP, NIST 800-53) and automated controls for cloud environments.
• Ability to anticipate and evaluate emerging cloud technologies and their impact on the organization's platform and applications, as well as potential to drive innovation and business value.
• Exceptional leadership, communication, and influencing skills to drive organizational transformation and inspire others.
• Certifications:
  • Preferred: Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect or Professional Cloud Security Engineer.
  • Recommended: Google Sales Credentials for GCP and Workspace to support cross-functional initiatives.
  • Demonstrates ongoing commitment to learning and mentoring through active participation in cert programs, working groups, and industry communities.

Key Characteristics:

• Visionary Leadership: Ability to define and articulate a compelling vision for the future of SRE and cloud platforms within the organization.
• Strategic Thinking: Deep understanding of business goals and the ability to align technology strategy with those goals. Navigates ambiguity with ease and adjusts technical strategy in response to new insights or market shifts.
• Technical Expertise: Mastery of cloud technologies, SRE practices, and DevOps principles.
• Influential Collaborator: Trusted by peers, stakeholders, leadership, and external partners alike for technical counsel and strategic guidance.
• Mentorship Mindset: Passion for developing others, enabling autonomy, and building cohesive engineering communities.
• Innovation and Impact: Drive to explore new technologies and implement innovative solutions that have a significant impact on the organization.