Principal AWS Architect

Job title: Principal AWS Architect

Reports to: VP, Infrastructure & Operations

Division: Central Services

Location: Remote

Grade: 21

About Priority: 

Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter. 

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities. 

At Priority, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive. 

About the Role: 

The Principal Cloud Architect plays a critical role in defining and governing cloud architecture standards across the organization. This position ensures that AWS-based solutions are scalable, secure, and aligned with enterprise best practices by driving consistency in design, documentation, and implementation. The role requires deep technical expertise, strong influence, and the ability to guide engineering teams toward high-quality architectural decisions. You’ll collaborate closely with Infrastructure, Engineering, and Product teams to enable reliable, cost-effective, and compliant cloud solutions.

Responsibilities: 

• Architectural Governance: Review all existing and proposed architecture diagrams to ensure technical validity, scalability, and adherence to company standards. 

• Documentation Standardization: Establish and enforce a centralized location and standardized format for all engineering documentation and architectural artifacts. 

• Quality Advocacy: Participate in developer design meetings to advocate for high-quality AWS designs, pushing for the adoption of pre-certified, secure, and cost-effective components. 

• Stakeholder Negotiation: Act as the primary representative for the Infrastructure team in design discussions, negotiating with development teams to resolve technical conflicts. 

• Strategic Influence: Use strong communication and persuasion skills to "sell" technical solutions to various stakeholders, including those with challenging or resistant personalities. 

• Standards Development: Structure and maintain the library of Priority certified components and architectural best practices. Drive education and adoption across the development community. 

• Compliance & Frameworks: Embed TOGAF principles and AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices into the infrastructure team’s workflows. 

• Mentorship & Support: Provide ongoing guidance and architectural leadership to engineering teams to improve their application designs over time. 

What Success Looks Like: 

• Cloud architectures are consistent, scalable, secure, and aligned with enterprise standards. 

• Engineering teams adopt standardized patterns and certified components across solutions.

• Architecture reviews improve design quality and reduce technical risk across the platform. 

• Documentation is centralized, structured, and consistently used across teams. 

• Stakeholders align on architectural decisions with minimal friction and clear rationale.

• AWS Well-Architected and TOGAF principles are embedded into daily engineering practices. 

• Engineering