Cloud Architect

The Cloud Architect (RHEL & Hybrid Cloud Specialist) is a senior-level technical leadership role designed for a visionary engineer who excels at the intersection of enterprise Linux stability and modern cloud agility. As organizations in 2026 increasingly move toward sophisticated hybrid-cloud models to balance performance, cost, and data sovereignty, this role serves as the primary architect and governor of our foundational technology stacks.

1.1 Position Specifications

Attribute

Details

Official Job Title

Cloud Architect (RHEL & Hybrid Cloud Specialist)

Location

Remote

Required Experience

Minimum 5+ years in Cloud Architecture or Senior Systems Engineering

Language Requirements

Portuguese and English

Key Technology Focus

RHEL, Ansible, Kubernetes, Hybrid Cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP)

1.2 Strategic Role Mission

The core mission of the Cloud Architect is to design, implement, and govern a world-class hybrid-cloud infrastructure that prioritizes the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ecosystem as its operational backbone. In the current landscape, where financial and technological sectors demand extreme reliability and automated scalability, this role is responsible for ensuring that our infrastructure is not just a collection of servers, but a cohesive, self-healing platform.

By treating infrastructure as code (IaC) and leveraging high-level automation via Ansible, the Cloud Architect will bridge the gap between legacy virtualization (KVM/VMware) and public cloud hyperscalers. The incumbent is expected to move the organization away from manual interventions toward an autonomous, policy-driven environment that supports rapid product iterations without compromising security or performance.

Strategic Importance:

In 2026, Cloud Architecture is defined by the ability to manage complexity through automation. This role is pivotal in reducing "Toil" across engineering teams, optimizing cloud spend through intelligent resource orchestration, and maintaining compliance with data privacy regulations through strict RHEL-based security hardening.

1.3 Key Objectives

The successful candidate will be evaluated on their ability to achieve the following high-level objectives:

Architectural Governance: Establish and enforce best practices for RHEL deployments across hybrid-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and GCP).

Automation Leadership: Drive the 100% automation goal for server provisioning, configuration management, and patching using Ansible.

Modernization Orchestration: Lead the transition of legacy workloads into containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes) while maintaining deep-level OS integrity.

Efficiency Optimization: Proactively identify and resolve system inefficiencies, performance bottlenecks, and resource waste to drive a lean infrastructure culture.

DevOps Integration: Seamlessly integrate infrastructure pipelines with application CI/CD workflows (Jenkins/GitLab) to facilitate a true DevSecOps model.

1.4 Candidate Profile

We are seeking a proactive technologist who refuses to accept manual work as the status quo. The ideal candidate possesses the analytical depth to troubleshoot a kernel panic on a RHEL instance and the architectural breadth to design a multi-region failover strategy. As a senior member of the team, you will act as a mentor to engineers and a strategic advisor to leadership, ensuring our technology choices align with the long-term scalability requirements of the target markets.

2. Key Responsibilities

The Cloud Architect (RHEL & Hybrid Cloud Specialist) is tasked with the strategic design and technical oversight of the organization's infrastructure. This role requires a blend of high-level architectural vision and deep-dive technical implementation to ensure that our cloud ecosystems are resilient, automated, and high-performing. The responsibilities are categorized into the following strategic domains:

2.1 Hybrid-Cloud Infrastructure Design & Strategy

The Architect is responsible for the end-to-end design of scalable and secure hybrid-cloud solutions across major hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

Architectural Blueprints: Develop and document robust high-level and low-level designs (HLD/LLD) that integrate on-premise data centers with public cloud environments.

Security by Design: Implement rigorous security architectures, including VPC/VNet segmentation, IAM policy governance, and encryption standards, ensuring compliance with global and local (POPIA) security frameworks.

Multi-Cloud Orchestration: Evaluate business requirements to determine the optimal placement of workloads, facilitating seamless portability between different cloud providers and on-premise virtualization stacks.

Disaster Recovery: Design high-availability and disaster recovery (DR) strategies that leverage cloud-native services to ensure business continuity for mission-critical RHEL workloads.

2.2 Enterprise Automation & RHEL Orchestration

A primary focus of this role is the elimination of manual configuration through enterprise-grade automation solutions, specifically optimized for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Ansible Framework Development: Architect and maintain a scalable Ansible automation framework to handle provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment across the RHEL estate.

RHEL Lifecycle Management: Design automated workflows for OS patching, kernel tuning, and security hardening (STIG/CIS benchmarks) to ensure all RHEL instances remain performant and compliant.

Self-Healing Infrastructure: Implement automated remediation scripts using Python and Ansible to detect and fix common system issues without manual intervention.

Standardization: Establish "Golden Image" pipelines for RHEL, ensuring consistency across development, staging, and production environments.

2.3 Systems Optimization & Proactive Problem Resolution:

Beyond standard maintenance, the Cloud Architect is expected to be a proactive agent of change. You must continuously monitor the ecosystem to identify systemic inefficiencies and performance bottlenecks. This involves designing architectural interventions—such as right-sizing cloud resources, optimizing network latency, or re-architecting underperforming components—before they impact business operations.

2.4 CI/CD Strategy & Pipeline Governance

The Architect bridges the gap between infrastructure and application development by designing robust delivery pipelines.

Pipeline Architecture: Design end-to-end CI/CD strategies using Jenkins or GitLab CI, focusing on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployment workflows.

Deployment Guardrails: Integrate automated security scanning, unit testing, and compliance checks into the deployment pipelines to "shift-left" security and quality.

Release Orchestration: Architect advanced deployment patterns such as Blue-Green, Canary, and Rolling updates to minimize downtime during application releases.

2.5 Technical Governance & Organizational Leadership

As a senior leader, the Cloud Architect provides the necessary governance to ensure all technology initiatives align with the broader organizational strategy.

Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and hands-on guidance to DevOps and Infrastructure teams, uplifting the organization's overall RHEL and cloud competency.

Architectural Standards: Define and enforce the organization's cloud and automation standards, participating in Architectural Review Boards (ARB) to vet new technologies.

Vendor Management: Collaborate with partners like Red Hat and public cloud providers to stay ahead of technical roadmaps and leverage new features for competitive advantage.

Cost Governance: Monitor cloud consumption metrics and architect cost-optimization strategies to ensure efficient utilization of the organizations technology budget.

Strategic Objective

Expected Outcome

Cloud Adoption maturity

Transition from siloed infrastructure to a unified hybrid-cloud model.

Automation coverage

Reduction of manual deployme