Principal Infrastructure Architect – Cloud & SaaS Platforms

Job Title

Principal Infrastructure Architect – Cloud & SaaS Platforms

We are a global leader in online protection, dedicated to making the digital world a safer place. We are seeking a highly experienced and hands‑on Principal Infrastructure Architect with a deep background in large‑scale multi‑cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and modern SaaS delivery. This is a unique opportunity to lead the architectural evolution of our platform, driving a critical migration from legacy EC2 topologies to cloud‑native EKS/Kubernetes clusters, and designing the backbone for our next‑generation AI and real‑time data services.

We highly value experience gained at FAANG or other leading Big Tech companies.

This is a Hybrid position located at either San Jose or Newport Beach, CA offices. You will be required to be on‑site 2 to 3 days per week. When you are not working on‑site, you will be working from your home office. We are only considering candidates within a commutable distance to either San Jose or Newport Beach, CA offices and are not offering relocation assistance at this time.

• Cloud Native Strategy & Migration: Lead the architectural design and execution of migrating legacy EC2‑based workloads to Amazon EKS and Kubernetes. Define standards for multi‑region availability, auto‑scaling, and spot instance orchestration.

• Advanced Traffic Management: Architect and deploy high‑performance API Gateways and specialized LLM Gateways to manage traffic for Generative AI workloads. Implement Service Mesh (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) for advanced traffic splitting, mTLS, and observability.

• Real‑Time Data Infrastructure: Design robust infrastructure for diverse storage engines, including AWS‑native databases (Dynamo
  
  DB, Aurora),
  OLAP systems, and real‑time databases like Aerospike and Druid to support sub‑millisecond latency requirements.

• Event‑Driven Backbone: Architect scalable Pub/Sub messaging systems (Kafka, SNS/SQS, Pulsar) to decouple microservices and enable event‑driven architectures at internet scale.

• Comprehensive Observability: Define and implement a unified observability strategy based on Open Telemetry (OTLP) standards. Integrate platforms like Grafana, Datadog, and Graylog to provide a "single pane of glass" visibility into logs, metrics, and traces.

• Identity & Security Engineering: Modernize Authentication and Authorization systems (OIDC, OAuth2, SPIFFE/SPIRE). Deploy and manage centralized Secret Stores (Hashi Corp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), security gateways, and automated certificate management systems.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Champion a "Git Ops" culture by treating infrastructure as software. Enforce best practices using Terraform, Crossplane, or Pulumi
  , ensuring all environments are reproducible and audit‑compliant.

• Technical Leadership: Mentor senior infrastructure engineers, drive "Well‑Architected" reviews, and collaborate with software teams to ensure infrastructure supports rapid product iteration.

• 10+ years of professional experience in infrastructure engineering and architecture, with a proven track record of managing large‑scale cloud deployments in AWS (primary), GCP, or Azure.

• Kubernetes Expert: Deep, hands‑on mastery of Kubernetes and EKS
  , including experience with custom controllers, operators, and migrating stateful/stateless workloads from VMs to containers.

• Database Reliability: Strong experience architecting infrastructure for high‑scale data systems, specifically real‑time stores (
  Aerospike, Redis
  ) and analytics engines (
  Druid, Click House
  ).

• Security & Compliance: Extensive experience designing secure infrastructure, including implementation of Zero Trust networks, WAFs, and secret management systems. Familiarity with compliance standards (SOC2, PCI‑DSS) is a plus.

• Observability Stack: Proven ability to build observability pipelines from scratch using Open Telemetry collectors and backend visualization tools (Prometheus/Grafana/Datadog).

• Automation & Scripting: Expert‑level proficiency in Go, Python, or Bash
  . You automate toil relentlessly and have deep experience with CI/CD pipelines (Git Lab CI, Git Hub Actions, ArgoCD).

• Networking Fundamentals: Deep…