Senior Cloud Architect (AWS)

Senior AWS architect to join the infrastructure team behind client's emergency dispatch platform. Remote, hands-on, reporting to the founder.

Eligible candidates will have

~10 years in infrastructure, most of it deep on AWS as architect or lead

Owned security posture under HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001 or similar

Led an infra/platform team and carried the pager for production uptime

About the role

Client is hiring a Senior Cloud Architect, proficient in AWS, to join our team and drive infrastructure and architecture forward. Remote first, full time, reporting to the founder, start as soon as you can.

When someone calls our emergency line, the dispatch platform behind that call runs on AWS. It has to be up, fast and secure at 3am on a Sunday, not just during business hours. We need someone who keeps that true today and designs what it becomes as we grow across the continent.

This is a senior role joining our existing infrastructure team in a hands-on capacity. You help define the strategy and make architecture calls with the team. You also build a lot of it yourself in the first stretch, and help maintain what is already working.

About the company

Client runs East Africa's largest emergency response network, and now Southern Africa too: Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. We have completed more than 65,000 lifesaving missions.

Our in-house CAD is the system behind every emergency we handle. Various other apps support our EMS ecosystem and clients. All of it, the dispatch screens, the apps in the field, the integrations with partners, sits on infrastructure you would help shape and run.

We are about 60 people. Dispatch and operations work from our Nairobi office. Engineering is spread across Europe. Small enough that your decisions show up in production the same week, big enough that they matter.

What you'll do

• Lead architecture design and build. Strategy, roadmap and standards for our AWS platform, worked out with the engineers already here.
• Shape the AWS estate. A multi-account setup managing various environments together with the team.
• Keep us secure and compliant. Everything we hold lives inside a VPC, encrypted at rest and in transit. We are held to GDPR, HIPAA and the Kenya Data Protection Act: IAM boundaries, network segmentation, audit trails, and the evidence to prove it.
• Run security monitoring.
• Improve pipelines, environments and secrets.
• Protect reliability.
• Build observability.
• Watch the cost.
• Write infrastructure as code.

What we're looking for

Must have

• AWS, more than anything. Around a decade in infrastructure with most of it on AWS, the last several years as an architect or lead. Real traffic, real consequences. VPC design, IAM, Organizations and Identity Center, ECS or EKS, RDS, KMS, networking across regions: you can talk through all of it without opening the docs, and you have the scars from when it went wrong.
• You have led an infrastructure or platform team before.
• You have been the one on the hook for uptime. You have carried the pager, run the incident and written the post-mortem, and you have designed the on-call that other people carry.
• Infrastructure as code as a habit, not a one-off project. Terraform, CDK or Pulumi, with CI/CD pipelines you built yourself.
• Security as a design input. You have owned a security posture under a real compliance regime (HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001 or similar) and defended it to auditors or customers.
• You have owned a cloud budget and can explain it line by line.
• You write well. Architecture decisions, runbooks, incident reports, the case for a change. A remote team runs on writing.
• You can explain a trade-off to a founder in two minutes and defend it in a pull request comment.
• Comfortable setting direction for engineers who were here before you, and honest about what you do not know yet.

Nice to have

• Management experience leading engineers.
• Honed communication and leadership skills.
• Built or run infrastructure for users in areas with patchy connectivity and cross-border data rules.
• Healthcare, emergency services or another domain where downtime hurts people, not just revenue.
• Backends for mobile apps, real-time dispatch or location-heavy systems.
• Postgres, properly: backups, replication, tuning under load.
• AWS Professional or Specialty certifications. What you have shipped on AWS matters more.

How we work

Remote first. Engineering is distributed, and operations sits in Nairobi on East Africa Time (UTC+3). We would like a good chunk of your day to overlap with ours, so anywhere from West to East Africa or Western Europe to Eastern Europe works best, but open to people in the Western Hemisphere depending on your available hours.

Small team, high ownership. You report to the founder, you sit with the leadership team, and decisions get made in days, not quarters. Nobody will ask you to write a deck to get a change approved. Collaboration with the team and regular meetings for alignment are a daily requirement.

Meeting-light weeks besides our daily alignment call, so people can actually build. We lean on written communication wherever it works, and we expect you to be good at both written and interpersonal communication.