Overview:
Serves as the senior technical visionary and enterprise leader responsible for designing and building a modern, scalable cloud architecture at Dartmouth Health. This role drives the organization's new cloud-native build while strategically migrating and integrating with the existing legacy on-premises and hybrid environment. The Senior Cloud Architect owns the end-to-end cloud strategy across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, ensures HIPAA-compliant, resilient, and cost-optimized solutions, mentors technical teams, and aligns cloud capabilities with clinical, research, and business priorities in a complex healthcare setting.
Responsibilities:
- Define, evolve, and communicate the enterprise cloud strategy and target architecture, with a strong emphasis on cloud-native and hybrid/multi-cloud designs that accelerate the new cloud build while enabling secure, low-disruption migration from legacy systems
- Lead the architecture, design, deployment, and modernization of complex solutions across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS; select and integrate appropriate cloud services while addressing constraints from legacy environments, regulatory requirements, and mission-critical healthcare workloads. Establishes, governs, documents, communicates, and enforces cloud infrastructure standards, design principles, and best practices, ensuring consistency across environments and teams.
- Own the development and enforcement of cloud technology standards, reference architectures, guardrails, and best practices (including Infrastructure as Code and policy-as-code); chair the Architecture Review Board and drive governance for both new cloud builds and legacy integration points.
- Provide expert architectural consulting, direction, and hands-on mentorship to systems analysts, cloud engineers, other architects, and cross-functional teams; promote a DevSecOps culture, automation, and continuous improvement.
- Maintain deep knowledge of the current IT landscape — including legacy infrastructure, interdependencies, and technology portfolio — while designing pathways to modern cloud architectures that deliver greater agility, scalability, and innovation.
- Develop, manage, and optimize the cloud infrastructure capacity plan, performance, observability, and disaster recovery strategies that support both greenfield cloud builds and hybrid legacy modernization.
- Conduct ongoing research on emerging technologies (serverless, container orchestration, event-driven architectures, AI/ML integration, edge computing); develop proofs-of-concept and recommend adoptions that enhance cost-effectiveness (via FinOps), flexibility, resilience, and clinical outcomes.
- Lead multi-year cloud investment roadmaps and FinOps initiatives, including detailed cost-benefit analyses, rightsizing, and opportunities for significant cost reduction while modernizing legacy workloads.
- Design, develop, and oversee implementation of secure, end-to-end cloud-native integrated systems (microservices, containers, serverless, API-first) that coexist with and gradually replace legacy components.
- Develop and execute comprehensive test, validation, and monitoring plans to ensure performance, security, and compliance of both new cloud architectures and hybrid integrations; report findings and drive iterative improvements.
- Ensure all architectures incorporate Zero Trust security, robust IAM, encryption, threat modeling, and full HIPAA/HITECH compliance, with special attention to protecting sensitive data during legacy-to-cloud transitions.
- Collaborate with leadership, security, compliance, clinical, and research stakeholders to translate complex requirements into actionable architectures and influence technology decisions that support Dartmouth Health’s digital transformation.
- Promote knowledge sharing through high-quality architecture documentation, standards, training, and thought leadership; act as the go-to expert for cloud modernization challenges involving legacy systems.
- Performs other duties as required or assigned
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, computer engineering, systems analysis, or a related field (Master’s degree preferred); or equivalent combination of education and extensive professional experience.
- 12+ years of progressive experience in IT architecture, with at least 5–7 years in senior or principal cloud roles focused on large-scale, regulated environments (healthcare strongly preferred).
- Deep hands-on expertise designing modern cloud-native architectures — including microservices, containers, serverless computing, event-driven systems, and API gateways — alongside proven success modernizing legacy environments through hybrid connectivity, refactoring, and phased migrations.
- Extensive experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, etc.), CI/CD pipelines, and DevSecOps practices.
- Strong understanding of multi-tier and large-scale distributed systems, relational/NoSQL databases, modern messaging/event services, loose coupling, stateless design, consistency models, CDN, and observability tools.
- Hands-on proficiency with cloud and traditional networking (VPCs, private links, service meshes, load balancing, firewalls, DNS, hybrid connectivity) building on foundational LAN/WAN and OSI knowledge.
- Comprehensive cloud security and compliance experience, including Zero Trust, IAM (OAuth/SAML/OIDC), encryption/key management, certificate-based authentication, and healthcare-specific frameworks (HIPAA, HITECH).
- Demonstrated success with FinOps-driven cost optimization, system performance tuning, capacity planning, and healthcare data considerations (e.g., interoperability, secure data lakes/warehouses).
- Experience leading cloud migrations and integrations that minimize risk to legacy clinical systems while delivering measurable improvements in scalability, resilience, and innovation.
- Ability to exercise independent judgment and take decisive action on complex, enterprise-level issues involving both new cloud builds and legacy constraints.
- Exceptional analytical, creative problem-solving, and strategic thinking skills.
- Outstanding listening, interpersonal, written, and oral communication skills; able to translate between technical depth and executive/business language.
- Logical, efficient, and highly detail-oriented with strong attention to quality and risk management.
- Highly self-motivated, directed, and able to thrive while prioritizing and executing under pressure in a dynamic healthcare environment.
- Strong customer service orientation and a collaborative, team-oriented mindset; proven ability to mentor and influence without direct authority.
Required Licensure/Certifications:
D
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health