Principal Cloud Technical Architect (Google)
Hybrid · Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa or Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Job Summary
Lead the architecture, design, and governance of enterprise-scale Google Cloud solutions; partner with sales and client stakeholders to develop cloud strategies, solution architectures, and transformation roadmaps; design highly available, secure, and scalable cloud platforms using Google Cloud best practices; define target-state architectures covering networking, security, identity, observability, automation, disaster recovery, and operational excellence; develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and Google Cloud Deployment Manager; provide architectural leadership for cloud migration, application modernization, containerization, and serverless initiatives; collaborate with engineering, DevOps, security, and application teams to implement CI/CD and platform automation; drive cloud security, compliance, governance, and FinOps; perform architecture reviews and provide technical oversight; mentor architects and engineers while contributing to cloud capability development and thought leadership; stay current with emerging Google Cloud services and cloud-native technologies.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related discipline
- 8+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, cloud architecture, or platform engineering with at least 4 years focused on Google Cloud
- Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification (required or strongly preferred)
- Deep expertise across Google Cloud services including VPC, Cloud Router, Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Bigtable/Firestore, Cloud IAM, Resource Manager, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud DNS, and Backup and DR
- Hands-on experience with Terraform and Google Cloud infrastructure automation frameworks
- Strong DevOps/CI/CD experience with Git, Docker, Kubernetes, and automation frameworks
- Experience implementing cloud security controls, compliance frameworks, and operational monitoring solutions
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management, solution presentation, and documentation skills
- Experience leading large-scale cloud migration and modernization programs
- Working knowledge of Microsoft Azure in hybrid or multi-cloud environments
- Experience with observability/monitoring platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk)
- Experience with Python, Bash, PowerShell or similar scripting languages
- Experience supporting pre-sales, RFP responses, and executive-level client engagements
- Hybrid workplace type: Hybrid
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