AWS Architect

Position Title: Senior AWS Architect 
Engagement Type: Full-time Contract (40 hours/week)
Location: Remote

Context:

We are seeking a highly specialized Senior AWS Architect to join a client-facing engagement with The Heppner Group, a mid-sized firm currently undergoing a strategic evaluation and overhaul of their AWS infrastructure. This role requires a hands-on expert with deep technical proficiency and excellent communication skills who can:

* Independently audit and assess the client’s existing AWS environment
* Deliver a comprehensive review report, outlining strengths, gaps, misconfigurations, and risks
* Provide strategic and tactical recommendations, including whether to optimize, fix, or re-architect the environment
* Own the remediation or re-implementation process end-to-end, ensuring scalability, security, and cost-efficiency

Role Responsibilities:

* Conduct a comprehensive audit of The Heppner Group’s AWS infrastructure, including VPC design, IAM policies, compute architecture, data pipelines, storage, networking, and security.
* Assess compliance with AWS best practices, including the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
* Deliver detailed findings and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
* Design and implement improvements, including infrastructure as code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, security hardening, and cost optimization strategies.
* Collaborate with internal technical teams and leadership at The Heppner Group to ensure alignment with business objectives.
* Lead and execute the migration, re-architecture, or remediation of legacy and/or sub-optimized infrastructure as needed.
* Set up monitoring, logging, and alerting systems for ongoing operational excellence.
* Ensure compliance with industry standards (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR) where applicable.
* Transfer knowledge to client teams and support skill development internally where appropriate.

Required Skills and Qualifications:

* 8+ years of cloud architecture experience, with 5+ years of deep, hands-on AWS expertise
* Proven experience conducting AWS infrastructure audits, assessments, and remediations
* AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional required (additional specialty certifications a plus)
* Expertise in:
  * VPC design and security
  * EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda
  * S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora
  * CloudFormation or Terraform (strong preference for IaC experience)
  * IAM and organizational security policies
  * AWS Config, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, and related security tooling
  * Cost analysis and billing management
* Strong background in DevOps, automation, and CI/CD tooling (e.g., CodePipeline, Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
* Experience with multi-account AWS Organizations and governance controls
* Excellent communication and client-facing skills; able to clearly translate complex architectures into business value
* Prior experience working in a consulting or contracting capacity preferred

Benefits of Joining This Opportunity:

* Strategic impact: Play a mission-critical role in modernizing a client’s cloud infrastructure with high autonomy.
* High visibility: Engage directly with executive leadership at The Heppner Group and influence key decisions.
* Remote flexibility: Primarily remote engagement with flexible scheduling.
* Stable contract: 40 hours/week for an initial six-month engagement, with strong potential for long-term extension or follow-on work.