Principal Platform Architect
Chicago, IL | Hybrid | Full-Time
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Talent Solutions Group is recruiting a Principal Platform Architect for a large, highly regulated enterprise undergoing significant platform and cloud modernization.
This is a senior hands-on individual contributor role for an architect who can define technical direction while remaining close enough to the technology to lead proof-of-concepts, evaluate solutions, and work directly with engineering teams.
The environment combines AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, stream processing, GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, and legacy platforms supporting highly available, performance-sensitive systems.
- Define architecture and technical direction for enterprise platform capabilities
- Design scalable, resilient Kubernetes and AWS infrastructure
- Establish architecture patterns for Kafka and real-time stream processing
- Develop reference architectures, standards, guardrails, and transition plans
- Define and improve GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and configuration management practices
- Lead technical evaluations and proof-of-concepts for new platform technologies
- Partner with application, engineering, security, and operations teams
- Design for availability, performance, scalability, recoverability, and operational resilience
- Establish observability and platform monitoring standards
- Identify infrastructure risks, capacity constraints, and opportunities for modernization
- Help move complex legacy environments toward modern cloud-native architecture
Required Experience
- 10+ years in infrastructure, platform engineering, systems architecture, or platform architecture
- Deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise, including architecture, networking, security, workload design, and operations
- Strong AWS architecture experience
- Hands-on Apache Kafka architecture and implementation experience
- Experience with Apache Flink or a comparable stream-processing framework
- Strong GitOps and infrastructure-as-code experience
- Experience with tools such as ArgoCD, Flux, Terraform and Helm
- CI/CD architecture and automation experience
- Experience working across both legacy/brownfield and cloud-native environments
- Strong Linux/Unix and container experience
- Ability to develop architecture diagrams, reference architectures, technical decisions, and migration plans
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence both senior technical leaders and engineering teams
Technology Environment
Kubernetes / EKS • AWS • Kafka • Flink • Terraform • Helm • ArgoCD / Flux • CI/CD • Docker • Linux • Observability
AWS experience should include several of the following:
- EKS
- EC2
- VPC
- S3
- IAM
- KMS
- Managed streaming services
- Monitoring and logging services
Preferred Background
- Large-scale, highly available enterprise platforms
- Financial services or another regulated industry
- High-throughput or performance-sensitive systems
- Enterprise observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry or Splunk
- Platform resilience and performance engineering
- AWS Solutions Architect certification
- TOGAF or similar architecture framework experience
This is not a purely conceptual enterprise architect role.
We're looking for someone who has personally worked with modern platform technologies and can move comfortably between architecture strategy and hands-on technical decision-making.
The strongest candidates will have substantial experience with Kubernetes + AWS + Kafka, understand how large production platforms actually operate, and be able to drive modernization in an environment where legacy and cloud-native technologies must coexist.
Education
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline preferred. Equivalent relevant professional experience will also be considered.
