What are the responsibilities and job description for the Cloud Software and Solutions Architect position at VAS?
Job Description
The Cloud Software and Platform Architect is responsible for defining and leading the end-to-end architecture of cloud hosted applications and the underlying platform, ensuring scalability, security, reliability, and cost efficiency. They partner with engineering, security, and product teams to shape cloud strategy, reference architectures, and implementation of roadmaps.
Responsibilities
Cloud & Platform Architecture Main
For the past 40 years we’ve woken up each day to support those that never stop feeding the world – and we have no plans to quit. We set the standard for farm management solutions and fix our eyes on raising the bar to meet the next generation of expectations.
Our software and information solutions help collect and connect a farm's data – from herd management to feed performance, tracking and more. These insights are a source of truth, empowering producers and their trusted advisors to make profit-driven and sustainable management decisions.
Whether near or far, large or small, VAS is at the heart of your dairy.
VAS has deep roots in the industry through its origin within the URUS family of companies. As a holding company with cooperative and private ownership, URUS is a family of businesses at the heart of the dairy and beef industry – Alta Genetics, GENEX, Genetics Australia, Leachman Cattle, Jetstream, PEAK, SCCL, Trans Ova Genetics and VAS. Each organization has its unique identity, products, and services. These companies work globally to provide cutting-edge dairy and beef genetics, customized reproductive services to maximize conceptions, dairy management information to take producers to the frontline of progressive dairy farming, and an array of products and services to help bovines reach their full genetic potential. URUS has 9 brands in 17 retail countries and employs nearly 2,800 people globally.
The Cloud Software and Platform Architect is responsible for defining and leading the end-to-end architecture of cloud hosted applications and the underlying platform, ensuring scalability, security, reliability, and cost efficiency. They partner with engineering, security, and product teams to shape cloud strategy, reference architectures, and implementation of roadmaps.
Responsibilities
Cloud & Platform Architecture Main
- Architect and oversee implementation of shared platform capabilities (landing zones, PaaS services, internal developer platforms, golden paths).
- Review solution designs and pull requests for architectural alignment, technical risk, and adherence to standards.
- Stay current on cloud provider roadmaps and emerging technologies, evaluating their fit and proposing adoption where it is beneficial.
- Collaborate with security teams to embed security-by-design (identity, network segmentation, encryption, secrets management, compliance controls) into cloud and platform architectures.
- Contribute to cloud governance, cost management, and optimization practices (tagging standards, right sizing, reserved instances, FinOps).
- Partner with data and integration teams to design data platforms (warehouses/lakes, streaming, ETL/ELT) and integration patterns (APIs, events, messaging) on the cloud.
- Define and govern data architecture standards across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, ensuring consistency, scalability, and interoperability across domains.
- Partner with enterprise and solution architects to establish canonical data models, data contracts, and metadata management frameworks aligned to business capabilities.
- Design data movement, lineage, and governance patterns supporting both analytical and operational workloads.
- Lead or support migration and modernization initiatives from on-prem to cloud (rehost, re-platform, refactor) including assessment, roadmaps, and solution designs.
- Define observability strategy (logging, metrics, tracing, SLOs) and resilience patterns (auto scaling, failover, DR, backup/restore).
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers, SREs, and developers; evangelize best practices in cloud native and platform engineering.
- 8–12 years in software engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps, including 3–5 years in cloud architecture.
- Deep hands-on expertise with AWS or Azure and strong knowledge of core cloud services (compute, storage, networking, IAM, security).
- Experience designing and building cloud ‑ native and distributed systems (microservices, containers, serverless).
- Proven ability to architect and operate containerized workloads with appropriate networking, security, and observability.
- Advanced proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM/Bicep, CloudFormation, Pulumi ) and CI/CD automation.
- Strong understanding of API design, event-driven architecture, and cloud integration patterns.
- Knowledge of modern data platforms (Databricks, data lakes/warehouses, streaming, ETL/ELT) and data modeling.
- Strong grasp of cloud security, compliance, and risk management (least privilege, zero trust, encryption, regulatory requirements).
- Excellent communication, documentation, and stakeholder engagement skills.
- Self-driven, collaborative, and experienced in mentoring and promoting engineering best practices.
- PREFERRED REQUIREMENTS
- Experience designing internal developer platforms or platform engineering offerings (self-service environments, golden paths, platform APIs).
- Background in SRE practices (SLOs, error budgets, incident management) and building highly available, resilient systems.
- Certifications from major cloud providers (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Professional Cloud Architect).
- Experience in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architectures and connectivity with on-premise environments.
For the past 40 years we’ve woken up each day to support those that never stop feeding the world – and we have no plans to quit. We set the standard for farm management solutions and fix our eyes on raising the bar to meet the next generation of expectations.
Our software and information solutions help collect and connect a farm's data – from herd management to feed performance, tracking and more. These insights are a source of truth, empowering producers and their trusted advisors to make profit-driven and sustainable management decisions.
Whether near or far, large or small, VAS is at the heart of your dairy.
VAS has deep roots in the industry through its origin within the URUS family of companies. As a holding company with cooperative and private ownership, URUS is a family of businesses at the heart of the dairy and beef industry – Alta Genetics, GENEX, Genetics Australia, Leachman Cattle, Jetstream, PEAK, SCCL, Trans Ova Genetics and VAS. Each organization has its unique identity, products, and services. These companies work globally to provide cutting-edge dairy and beef genetics, customized reproductive services to maximize conceptions, dairy management information to take producers to the frontline of progressive dairy farming, and an array of products and services to help bovines reach their full genetic potential. URUS has 9 brands in 17 retail countries and employs nearly 2,800 people globally.