Principal Cloud Architect

About the role

Symbotic is seeking a Principal Cloud Architect to join our Platform Engineering team within our Information Technology organization. This is a ground-floor opportunity on a newly formed team.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive Symbotic's cloud architecture strategy on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), establish cloud-native platform standards, and provide technical leadership for the next generation of scalable, secure, and AI-enabled engineering platforms.
• Architect for hyperscale growth, design provisioning, networking, and data architectures that scale rapidly and elastically to hundreds or thousands of instances and petabyte-scale daily data volumes.
• Migrate more than one hundred environments to the cloud while architecting greenfield platforms that must provision hundreds to thousands of instances on demand and handle petabyte-scale data generated daily by our robotics systems.
• Build a true self-service platform, not a ticket-driven service: engineer self-service, golden paths, resource-pool provisioning with guardrails, and the validation and merge-visibility controls that protect platform stability.
• Partner with the Security team to establish workload isolation across cloud resource hierarchies, secure disaster recovery, and snapshot/backup capabilities that ensure rapid recovery.
• Own cloud cost optimization and FinOps: design for efficiency so the platform delivers maximum capability within a disciplined budget.
• Champion AI-powered engineering — from AI-assisted development to intelligent, automated operations — so a small team can do more with less.
• Drive Platform Engineering capabilities including CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code that measurably improve developer velocity.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers and architects, run architecture review forums, and influence enterprise technology strategy with executive leadership.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Minimum of 12 years designing and implementing enterprise and cloud architectures, including at least one large-scale cloud migration or platform modernization you personally led.
• Minimum of 5 years in a Principal Architect, Lead Architect, or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
• Deep expertise with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) including GKE, GCP resource hierarchy and IAM, VPC design, and data services — or demonstrated depth on AWS/Azure with clear ability to lead on GCP.
• Proven experience operating at high scale: rapid, automated provisioning of large fleets and architectures handling very large data volumes and traffic.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes, containers, microservices, distributed systems, and APIs.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred) and GitOps-driven delivery.
• Experience building self-service Platform Engineering, CI/CD, and DevOps solutions adopted by multiple engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of cloud security and isolation models, identity, networking, observability, disaster recovery, and backup/snapshot strategies.
• Cloud cost management / FinOps experience at enterprise scale.
• Exceptional communication, executive influence, and architecture governance experience and able to explain complex architecture decisions to executives and win alignment across engineering organizations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting hybrid cloud / edge platforms that connect on-premises, industrial, or robotics environments to the cloud (e.g., Google Distributed Cloud / Anthos).
• Experience in robotics, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, or other physical-world automation industries.
• Experience with AI/ML platforms, GenAI developer tooling, or data platform architecture at petabyte scale.
• Experience standing up platform capabilities on a small or newly formed team.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., Google Professional Cloud Architect, CKA/CKS) or architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF).