Cloud Architect, Senior Staff

Qualcomm IT is seeking a Sr. Staff Cloud Architect to own the strategy, architecture, and execution of our GitOps-driven platform engineering capabilities. You will serve as a technical authority and organizational multiplier, setting the direction for our EKS platform today while building the foundation for future multi-cloud expansion. This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role for an IT architect who operates at the intersection of deep technical expertise and broad organizational leadership.

This role requires full-time onsite work in San Diego, CA (5 days per week).

**This role is not eligible for Qualcomm immigration sponsorship.

What You Will Own:

• Platform Strategy & Architecture: Define and drive the multi-year platform roadmap across EKS maturation and multi-cloud expansion; establish scalable platform patterns for multi-tenant environments including cluster lifecycle, upgrade strategies, and operational readiness; co-own architectural governance as a peer to others in IT.

• Infrastructure as Code: Own the Terraform platform strategy across module design, state management, multi-environment patterns, and IaC governance; establish reference implementations and guardrails that enable distributed engineering teams to deliver infrastructure consistently and safely at scale.

• Kubernetes Platform Engineering (EKS): Own end-to-end cluster provisioning and lifecycle management including autoscaling with Karpenter, add-on lifecycle management, and cluster upgrade and rollout strategies; establish organizational standards for cluster operations that scale across multiple teams and environments.

• GitOps & CI/CD Operating Model: Establish and own the enterprise GitOps operating model using Argo CD as the primary continuous delivery platform; define multi-environment promotion strategies, deployment guardrails, and auditable delivery pipelines; extend GitOps standards across multiple application and platform teams using GitHub Actions for CI/CD orchestration.

• Reliability, Observability & Cost: Own platform reliability and cost efficiency strategy; drive observability standards using Datadog and Prometheus/Grafana including dashboards, alerting, and SLO frameworks that measurably improve operational outcomes.

• Security & Policy: Define secure-by-default platform patterns and own policy enforcement using Kyverno and Cilium; serve as the technical authority partnering with security stakeholders on controls, exceptions, and governance.

• Organizational Leadership & Communication: Communicate platform strategy, investment rationale, and operational health to senior IT leadership; represent platform engineering in architecture reviews and cross-organizational forums; build alignment across platform, security, and application teams without direct authority.

• Technology Evaluation & Innovation: Lead structured build vs. buy assessments and proactively evaluate emerging platform technologies across the CNCF landscape; ensure the platform strategy remains forward-looking through disciplined evaluation of open-source projects, vendor capabilities, and multi-cloud control plane developments.

• Technical Talent Development: Mentor senior and staff engineers; shape hiring bar standards; establish communities of practice that raise the platform engineering capability across the Qualcomm enterprise.

• Operational Excellence: Own the on-call model, runbook standards, and incident response practices; lead high-severity incident resolution and long-term corrective action planning. On-call participation is required, including potential 24/7 coverage.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 10+ years of IT-related experience with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Applied Mathematics, or Engineering OR 14+ years without, with clear progression from technical execution to organizational technical leadership

• 5+ years operating Kubernetes at enterprise scale; deep EKS expertise required including multi-tenant architecture and cluster lifecycle ownership

• Advanced Terraform expertise including module strategy, state management, and multi-environment governance

• Strong CI/CD fundamentals using GitHub Actions or similar experience to build pipelines integrating building, linting, testing, DevSecOps, and Argo CD integration

• Advanced AWS expertise across networking, IAM, and the EKS ecosystem in complex enterprise environments

• Proven track record driving cross-organizational technical strategy and influencing senior stakeholders without direct authority

• Strong Linux and distributed systems troubleshooting skills across Kubernetes, networking, and AWS

• Experience with Helm/Kustomize, Kubernetes networking fundamentals, and Cilium

• Clear written and verbal communication skills across both engineering and executive audiences

• Platform product thinking, treating developer experience as a product with measurable outcomes

Highly Desired:

• Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKAD/CKS) and/or AWS Solutions Architect Professional / DevOps Engineer Professional

• Experience with Karpenter cost optimization, Kyverno policy-at-scale, and Crossplane concepts

• Demonstrated success building self-service "paved road" platform capabilities at scale