The successful candidate will be responsible for leading the practice’s ambitious growth initiative with our most strategic cloud partners. This opportunity is scoped for high performing, high potential subject matter experts who are self-directed, entrepreneurial, highly collaborative, organized, diligent, and thoughtful. This role requires a domain expertise combined with the ability to task-organize, focus on the details, and sustain and drive progress over time. For the right candidate, this role offers an opportunity to contribute to rapid revenue growth in one of the most exciting and dynamic segments of the market. This is an ideal opportunity for technologists seeking cross vertical and/or cross industry expertise. Among other career-enhancing considerations, this role provides opportunities to directly and indirectly manage teams. The entire AIA leadership team is personally committed to the success of the architects on-boarded through this focused cloud hiring initiative. Principal Responsibilities Lead joint solution/offering architecture discussions with partner architects/stakeholders and support development RFPs: Craft and manage solution architecture and proposal defense for reactive and proactive proposals responses for data platforms and solutions on cloud Turnkey Proposals: Drive turnkey proposals for data platforms, analytics, built cost summaries, value propositions as part of cloud modernization, data portfolio rationalization Provide leadership for the transformation of customer requirements into visions, strategies, and roadmaps to implement data platforms, multi-cloud , cloud data warehouse Independently lead client design workshops and provide tradeoffs and recommendations Contribute to the Cognizant Data community by developing assets, thought leadership, etc Technical Qualifications Preferred cloud competencies: Certified Solution Architect on one of the clouds Aware of PaaS services relating to Data, Analytics and end-point API interfaces - EMR/Dataproc/Databricks etc. Able to compare and contrast between best of technologies by layer – , stream processing, messaging, search, etc. High-level awareness of other partner technologies, which are alternative to native services like Snowflake, Cloudera, Talend, Informatica, Confluent, etc. Key competencies Excellent consulting, communication, influencing and facilitation skills, in particular problem solving/troubleshooting activities. Lead key data architecture decisions, design of architectural roadmaps, database, data access and data technology architectures Provide expertise on the overall data eco-system’s engineering best practices, standards, architectural approaches, and complex technical resolutions Holistic knowledge of solution architecture, including: Data layers and purpose Serverless compute Processing run time – ETL vs Spark run time, etc. Security controls around authentication, authorizations, encryption and certificates Recommend the migration tools and design data migration strategy Metadata and data catalogs Excellent communication skills, preparing PowerPoint presentations, executive readouts Key Experience Successfully built and defended solution architecture with different levels of technical stakeholders – Business heads, enterprise architects, tech leads, etc.