Principal Architect, Infrastructure

Job description

Zencore is a fast-growing company founded by former Google Cloud leaders, architects, and engineers. We are seeking candidates with significant experience in Google Cloud to join our team. Our engagements aim to eliminate obstacles, reduce risk, and accelerate timelines for customers transitioning to Google and seeking assistance with data and application modernization. We embed within customer teams to provide strategic guidance, facilitate technology decisions, and execute projects in a collaborative, co-development style. As a Principal Architect at Zencore, you will primarily work with large, complex enterprise organizations, helping them navigate the challenges of modernization. Our clients look to you as a resilient, trusted advisor who can deliver results in highly demanding environments. You are responsible for the technical oversight and end-to-end delivery of projects and will be expected to bridge the gap between legacy infrastructure and modern cloud architecture, integrating with enterprise-grade tooling while ensuring seamless alignment with Google Cloud standards. You must be comfortable managing complex stakeholder dynamics, diffusing tension, and maintaining a cool head when engagements become high-pressure. ### Responsibilities - **Strategic Delivery:** Lead the technical vision for client engagements. Turn complex business requirements into clear, actionable proposals and Statements of Work (SoW), while providing accurate resource estimates and timelines. - **Technical Stewardship:** Act as the primary technical lead on project teams. Maintain the balance between architectural oversight and "hands-on" keyboard execution. Unblock the team when projects encounter technical or organizational friction. - **Organizational Navigation:** Successfully navigate the internal complexities and matrixed structures of large organizations. Keep projects on track by maintaining professional composure and influencing stakeholders at all levels, even in complex or resistant environments. - **Mentorship:** Act as an expert practitioner within client organizations. Educate and up-skill client teams, fostering a culture of technical excellence and sustainable engineering practices. - **Relationship Management:** Serve as a stabilizing force during high-pressure engagements. Build trust managing client expectations, navigate complexity, and maintaining a strong focus on successful delivery through changing circumstances. ### Qualifications - Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience. - **Enterprise GCP Expertise:** Deep experience integrating Google Cloud within complex enterprise ecosystems. You understand how to map Google Cloud capabilities to strict governance, security, and compliance frameworks. - **Legacy & Modernization:** Proven track record of architecting solutions that integrate or migrate legacy infrastructure (on-prem/data center) into modern, cloud-native environments without service disruption. - **Platform & Tooling Mastery:** Advanced proficiency with modern DevOps/SRE tooling (e.g., Terraform/IaC, CI/CD, Kubernetes/GKE, Service Mesh). You understand how to implement these in environments with high operational complexity. - **Security & Networking:** Solid grasp of enterprise networking and security best practices (e.g. IAM, Confidential Computing, Security Command Center etc) required for large-scale production deployments. - **Domain Specialization:** Ability to go deeper than most on one or more domains: Software Architecture, Data Platform Modernization, Platform Engineering, or Large-scale Networking. ### Behavioral Competencies & Mindset - **Resilience & EQ:** Exceptional emotional intelligence. You remain calm, professional, and solution-oriented when clients become challenging. You don’t get flustered by friction. - **Proactive Ownership:** You have a bias for action. You identify what needs to be done and execute without waiting for specific instructions. - **Collaborative Professionalism:** You foster a positive team environment and remain easy to collaborate with, even during challenging situations. - **Consultative Savvy:** You understand that for an enterprise client, the "human" and "political" aspects of a project are as critical as the code. You are comfortable managing stakeholders, diffusing conflict, and ensuring alignment.