Engineering - Cloud Architecture and Engineering - Systems Engineer - Vice President - Seattle

About the role

The Foundational Infrastructure Cloud Architecture and Engineering team within Foundation Engineering at Goldman Sachs is responsible for designing new cloud patterns and solutions to transform key infrastructure platforms to be cloud native. This role involves designing and implementing scalable, highly available, secure, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure used to run critical production workloads across the firm.

Responsibilities

• Design, evolve, and own reference architectures and standardized infrastructure patterns for running Linux-based workloads on AWS, with a focus on EC2 and ECS-based platforms.
• Architect and implement scalable, highly available, secure, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure used to run critical production workloads across the firm.
• Work closely with other infrastructure engineers, SREs, and application teams, acting as a technical authority for cloud-based Linux platforms, while maintaining ownership of systems throughout their full lifecycle.
• Lead the design of repeatable, automation-first patterns for migrating and operating workloads from on-premises environments to AWS, including hybrid connectivity and stateful Linux workloads.
• Partner closely with application teams, SREs, and platform engineers to understand workload characteristics and translate them into resilient infrastructure designs, balancing performance, reliability, cost, and operational complexity.
• Apply systems-level thinking to identify and mitigate risks related to performance, capacity, availability, and failure domains in large-scale distributed environments.
• Contribute deep Linux systems expertise to architectural decisions, including OS behavior, capacity modeling, operational characteristics, and production troubleshooting.
• Promote and enable automation-driven operations to reduce manual effort, configuration drift, and operational risk across cloud platforms.
• Provide senior technical leadership through mentorship, design guidance, and hands-on support during complex design efforts, incident analysis, and cross-team problem solving.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in infrastructure or cloud architecture roles, with hands-on production experience building and operating AWS-based platforms.
• Deep expertise in Linux systems architecture, including production operations, performance analysis, and troubleshooting in distributed environments.
• Strong experience designing and operating highly available, scalable infrastructure systems, with a solid understanding of networking, distributed systems concepts, and infrastructure failure modes.
• Demonstrated ability to define and drive adoption of standardized infrastructure patterns or reference architectures across multiple engineering teams.
• Proven experience making and communicating complex architectural decisions, including clear written and verbal communication tailored to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Coding Skills: Demonstrated hands-on experience in scripting and coding, particularly with languages such as Python.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading or contributing to large-scale on-premises to cloud migration programs, including hybrid or phased migration strategies.
• Familiarity with multi-account AWS architectures, landing zones, shared services models, and hybrid connectivity (e.g., Direct Connect, Transit Gateway).
• Prior experience serving as a design reviewer or architectural authority in formal governance or design review forums.
• Experience advising on cloud compute and CPU architecture selection, including tradeoffs among x86, ARM, and specialized instance families.
• Strong understanding of hardware-level considerations (e.g., NUMA topology, memory bandwidth, IO characteristics) and their impact on Linux workload performance.
• Ability to provide architectural guidance to specialized or emerging platforms (e.g., AI/ML workloads) with a focus on performance, scalability, cost efficiency, and operational risk.