AWS Solution Architect

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
Initialize IT

AWS Solution Architect – Cambridge (2 days a week) – £345

We are looking for an experienced Solution Architect to design and lead the implementation of scalable, cloud-native systems on AWS. You will work across engineering, product, and business stakeholders to define architecture for distributed microservices platforms powered by event-driven patterns – translating complex requirements into resilient, production-grade solutions.

Architecture Design & Governance

• Define end-to-end system architectures aligned with business goals and engineering capabilities.
• Establish and enforce design principles, architectural standards, and best practices.
• Conduct architecture reviews, threat modelling sessions, and design critiques.
• Own and maintain technical roadmaps across multiple product domains.

Microservices Strategy

• Lead service decomposition efforts using Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles.
• Define domain boundaries, bounded contexts, and inter-service communication contracts.
• Design RESTful, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs with a focus on backward compatibility and versioning.
• Set patterns for service resilience: circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads, and rate limiting.
• Establish observability standards: distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics.

Event-Driven Architecture

• Design event streaming and async messaging systems using Apache Kafka, Amazon SQS/SNS, EventBridge, and Kinesis.
• Define and enforce event schema standards and schema evolution strategies.
• Implement event sourcing, CQRS, and saga orchestration patterns where appropriate.
• Govern event-driven data flows across bounded contexts and third-party integrations.

AWS Cloud Engineering

• Design AWS infrastructure using EKS, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, and VPC networking.
• Define Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards using Terraform and/or AWS CDK.
• Oversee multi-account AWS organisation structure, landing zones, and guardrails (AWS Control Tower).
• Lead cloud migration and modernisation initiatives from on-premise to AWS.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Partner with engineering leads, product managers, and C-suite to align technical strategy with business objectives.
• Present architecture proposals, trade-off analyses, and risk assessments to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Act as a trusted advisor to external clients or partners where required.
• Mentor and upskill senior engineers on architecture patterns and cloud-native practices.

Security, Reliability & Cost

• Embed security into architecture from day one: IAM, KMS, WAF, AWS Shield, and secrets management.
• Design for reliability using multi-AZ deployments, DR strategies, and defined SLAs/SLOs.
• Drive FinOps practices: right-sizing, reserved capacity planning, and cloud cost optimisation.