Principal Cloud Architect

ZoomInfo is where careers accelerate. We move fast, think boldly, and empower you to do the best work of your life. You’ll be surrounded by teammates who care deeply, challenge each other, and celebrate wins. With tools that amplify your impact and a culture that backs your ambition, you won’t just contribute. You’ll make things happen–fast.

What You'll Do

• Design platform patterns end-to-end,build reference implementations, document the rationale, and partner with implementation teams to roll them out. Stay hands-on through proof-of-concept and initial enablement, writing reference implementations and opening PRs to jumpstart team adoption.

• Bring a consistent, documented rubric to weekly architecture reviews so teams get reliable guidance. Expand our standards library and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).

• Provide architectural stewardship in one of our focus areas:
• Cloud Infrastructure Architecture: Own the architecture for our cloud runtime, networking, service mesh, container platforms, and overall infrastructure scalability, resilience, and security.
• Data Architecture: Own event streaming/messaging, database technology strategy, pipeline patterns, warehouse, and lakehouse strategies.

• Evaluate emerging technologies through structured POCs, drive standards for onboarding and phase-out, and lead evaluations of vendor changes and consolidation opportunities. Partner with FinOps on cost optimization in your depth area, including emerging AI/model infrastructure spend.

• Host design reviews and workshops. Serve as a technical consultant to engineering teams making complex infrastructure choices. Make patterns consumable and self-service so teams don't reinvent the wheel.

• Contribute to the multi-year platform direction,developer experience, delivery pipelines, and AI-augmented architecture review tooling,in partnership with platform engineering teams.

What We're Looking For

• Proven track record of setting technical direction across large-scale systems many teams depend on,cloud, networking, data, or delivery. Ability to defend architectural choices against real production workloads.

• Production experience with GCP and/or AWS, paired with solid understanding of trade-offs. Practical experience with Kubernetes (GKE or equivalent) as the runtime foundation for modern workloads.

• Strong proficiency in Terraform, GitOps workflows, and designing/reviewing reusable modules that other teams depend on.

• Depth in at least one domain:
• Cloud Infrastructure: Cloud-native networking, Kubernetes/container orchestration, and service mesh; designing for scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency; ensuring infrastructure and network security.
• Data Architecture: Messaging platforms, database technology fluency, pipeline design, and open table formats.

• Strong technical leadership, writing, and presentation skills. Track record of driving standards adoption across engineering organizations without formal managerial authority.

• Demonstrated ability to run rigorous technology evaluations,separating vendor pitch from architectural fit, running POCs, and producing actionable recommendations for engineering leaders.

Bonus Points

• Depth in both Cloud Infrastructure and Data Infrastructure domains.

• Experience with GCP organization-level policies, folder structure, and IAM inheritance design.

• Confluent Platform knowledge beyond core Kafka.

• Experience running or participating in an Architecture Review Council or equivalent governance body.

• Hands-on experience building or applying AI-augmented architecture review workflows.

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10-15+ years of cloud infrastructure, platform, DevOps, or data architecture experience.

The actual compensation offered will be based on factors such as the candidate’s work location, qualifications, skills, experience and/or training.