Principal Cloud Solutions Architect

isolved HCM delivers 40 years of industry experience daily to its 200,000+ "People Hero" customers. Headquartered in Charlotte, NC with 18 US locations, isolved is also a global enterprise with locations in India, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico. isolved has been awarded top places to work in the USA 2023 and is proud of its top employee engagement results in 2024. Our People Heroes have rated us number one in vendor satisfaction within Sapient Insights Group's HR Systems Survey for two years in a row.

About the role

The Principal Cloud Solutions Architect is a senior technical and people leader responsible for defining the enterprise cloud, platform, and data architecture strategy on Microsoft Azure. This role provides architectural vision, technical governance, and hands-on guidance while leading a team of cloud architects and engineers. The Principal Architect drives cloud modernization, reliability, and data platform excellence, ensuring solutions align with business strategy, scalability, security, and operational maturity.

Responsibilities

• Own the target-state architecture for the enterprise data platform across ingestion, transformation, storage, compute, and delivery layers
• Define and enforce architectural standards, guardrails, and reusable patterns; lead design reviews and document platform decisions (ADRs)
• Drive platform strategy and roadmap aligned to business priorities, including build-vs-buy decisions and technology evaluations
• Design platform capabilities as reusable, self-serve data products with clear interfaces, SLAs, and ownership
• Establish consumption patterns that enable domain teams and analytics engineers to self-serve while maintaining governance, quality, and lineage
• Design and manage Azure cloud infrastructure and networking for Databricks, including hub-spoke topology, Private Link, and secure service connectivity
• Own Databricks workspace administration (Unity Catalog, access controls, service principals, cluster policies, secrets, cost optimization)
• Implement identity, access, and security controls using Azure Entra ID, SCIM provisioning, RBAC, data masking, encryption, and audit logging
• Define and enforce ingestion and integration standards (e.g., Fivetran) and ensure seamless support for dbt and analytics engineering workflows
• Own operational reliability through IaC, CI/CD, observability, performance tuning, incident response, and translating platform capabilities into business outcomes

Requirements

• Senior or staff-level experience as a data platform architect or principal engineer, with demonstrated ownership of end-to-end platform architecture
• 10+ years of experience
• Proven track record of defining and driving a data platform architectural roadmap, not just executing on one
• Experience designing self-serve data platform capabilities and data product patterns for domain-oriented consumption
• Deep practical knowledge of Azure networking: VNet injection, private endpoints, NSG/UDR configuration, Private Link, and hub-spoke topology in a data platform context
• Proven hands-on experience with Databricks workspace administration: Unity Catalog, service principals, cluster policies, ACLs, and secrets management
• Strong identity and access management skills: Azure Entra ID, service principal lifecycle, managed identities, and OAuth M2M configuration
• Hands-on Terraform experience for provisioning and managing Databricks workspaces and Azure resources
• Experience configuring ADLS Gen2, external locations, and storage credentials for Databricks
• Familiarity with Fivetran or equivalent managed ingestion tooling and incremental ingestion patterns
• Working familiarity with dbt project structure and medallion architecture sufficient to support and collaborate with analytics engineering teams (awareness, not deep expertise)
• Proven track record of designing secure, governed data solutions in collaboration with security and compliance teams
• Excellent communication skills - able to present architectural decisions to both technical teams and business stakeholders

Skills

• Azure Microsoft Architecture
• C#
• SQL
• Unit Testing
• .NET
• .NET/ASP.NET Core Web API
• JavaScript
• SOLID Principles

Preferred Experience

• Knockout
• Azure Cosmos DB or NoSQL database
• Pub/Sub and asynchronous messaging
• Docker
• MVVM

About isolved

isolved is an employee experience leader, providing intuitive, people-first HCM (Human Capital Management) technology. Our solutions are delivered directly or through our partner network to more than five million employees and 200,000 employers - who use them every day to boost performance, increase productivity, and accelerate results while reducing risk. Our HCM platform, isolved People Cloud, seamlessly connects and manages the employee journey across talent management, HR & payroll, workforce management, and engagement management functions. No matter the industry, we help high-growth organizations employ, enable, and empower their workforce by transforming employee experience for a better today and a better tomorrow.