Lead Cloud Architect

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions and enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed.  We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive at every stage of your career. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.

Job Description

Job Description

The Cloud Architect provides cloud architectural leadership by designing, guiding, and governing cloud‑native and hybrid architectures. This role enables application migrations, creates reusable enterprise patterns, and ensures solutions meet requirements for security, compliance, resiliency, operational readiness, and cost efficiency.

This position blends hands‑on technical depth with enterprise‑level influence, requiring strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to drive alignment across application, platform, security, and infrastructure teams. The role requires strong experience in either Azure or AWS, with the ability and willingness to learn, adapt, and support both platforms as business needs evolve.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture and Leadership

· Provide high-level architectural guidance and ensure alignment between cloud architecture and business requirements.

· Define and evolve cloud architecture patterns, standards, and reference architectures to support scalability, resiliency, security, and cost efficiency.

· Set the direction of the cloud architecture roadmap; evaluate strategic horizons and determine appropriate levels of investment and ROI for engineering initiatives.

· Foster a culture of architecture that enables iterative delivery, autonomous teams, reuse of shared services, and future scaling—minimizing the cost of change over time.

· Act as a technical lead during application migrations and modernization efforts, identifying architectural, tooling, and platform gaps that could block delivery.

· Translate application requirements into approved cloud platform patterns, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards, guardrails, and governance processes.

· Convert one-off migration and integration efforts into repeatable, enterprise-approved patterns, blueprints, and reference implementations.

· Document and socialize solutions to accelerate future migrations, reduce systemic risk, and improve consistency across teams.

Cloud Enablement and Readiness

· Partner closely with platform, security, tooling, infrastructure, and data teams to resolve complex integration issues across identity, entitlements, secrets management, automation, networking, and data platforms.

· Facilitate discovery sessions, design reviews, and technical decisioning forums to unblock migrations and drive standardization.

· Use systematic debugging techniques to diagnose issues across distributed systems; lead incident response across engineering as needed.

· Identify weaknesses in infrastructure automation, configuration management, and post-build processes; drive improvements that increase reliability and repeatability.

· Provide actionable feedback to platform teams to improve tooling stability, error handling, observability, and operational resilience.

· Design and validate architectures for regional resiliency, disaster recovery, and failover readiness; partner with teams and vendors to test and remediate gaps.

· Support complex data migration and integration patterns, working through security, authentication, and execution context constraints.

Governance, Risk and Stakeholder Management

· Drive a culture of quality engineering: strong reviews, thoughtful release practices, and delivery that minimizes disruption to production.

· Define and drive organizational testing strategy using quality metrics and accepted frameworks (e.g., testing pyramid) to identify gaps and recommend improvements.

· Ensure expectations are clear across teams and stakeholders; identify dependencies early and help resolve them before they become delivery risks.

· Coach teams on prioritization, trade-offs, and technical debt management; identify and manage technical and business risks aligned to enterprise goals.

Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree, or equivalent work experience
- Eight or more years of related experience

Preferred Skills & Experience

· Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience

· 12+ years of experience in engineering execution, technical leadership, or architecture roles

· 5+ years of relevant experience in designing and operating distributed systems lever