Cloud Platform Architect at Morgan Stanley in Alpharetta, GA

In the Technology division, we leverage innovation to build the connections and capabilities that power our Firm, enabling our clients and colleagues to redefine markets and shape the future of our communities. This is a Lead Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering position at the Director level, which is part of the job family responsible for managing and optimizing technical infrastructure and ensuring the seamless operation of IT systems to support business needs effectively.

Morgan Stanley is an industry leader in financial services, known for mobilizing capital to help governments, corporations, institutions, and individuals around the world achieve their financial goals.

Interested in joining a team that’s eager to create, innovate and make an impact on the world? Read on.

PEArch is seeking a Cloud Platform Engineering Architect to support the ETRADE Cloud program. The role will contribute to the design and evolution of secure, resilient, scalable, automated, and well-governed platform capabilities, with primary expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The architect will translate application, business, security, infrastructure, and operational requirements into reusable platform architecture patterns aligned with enterprise architecture, engineering, risk, and regulatory standards.

The architect will work across platform engineering, application development, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, networking, operations, risk, and governance teams. The role will shape target-state and transitional architectures, establish reusable platform patterns, support proofs of concept, and guide engineering teams through implementation and production readiness. The primary focus is enabling ETRADE workloads on GCP while supporting integration with existing enterprise environments and, where applicable, AWS services.

What you’ll do in the role:

• Own and contribute to end-to-end platform engineering architecture for ETRADE cloud capabilities, from conceptual design through implementation and production readiness.
• Define target-state, transitional, and migration architectures for applications moving from existing environments to secure cloud-native platforms.
• Develop reference architectures, architecture principles, reusable patterns, standards, guardrails, and decision records for platform services.
• Design cloud landing-zone capabilities covering organization and project structures, networking, identity, security controls, logging, monitoring, policy enforcement, and operational governance.
• Create platform architecture patterns for Kubernetes, workload identity, APIs, event-driven services, data services, observability, resiliency, and automation.
• Design and guide GCP capabilities using GKE, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud DNS, Secret Manager, Cloud KMS, and Cloud Monitoring.
• Define platform product capabilities and paved-road patterns that enable secure self-service provisioning, consistent developer experience, and repeatable workload onboarding.
• Establish architecture for infrastructure as code, CI/CD, GitOps, policy as code, configuration management, automated testing, vulnerability scanning, artifact governance, and environment promotion.
• Design infrastructure architecture covering virtual networks, subnets, routing, firewalls, private connectivity, ingress, egress, DNS, proxies, load balancing, certificates, secrets, and key management.
• Define secure connectivity patterns across GCP, enterprise data centers, SaaS providers, external services, and AWS where required.
• Guide GKE and Kubernetes architecture including private clusters, workload identity, secrets management, ingress, autoscaling, network policy, cluster security, resiliency, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
• Define identity and access-management patterns for federation, service accounts, role-based access, workload identity, privileged access, and least-privilege controls.
• Define high-availability, disaster-recovery, backup, restoration, capacity, performance, observability, and production-support architecture patterns.
• Lead and participate in architecture reviews, technical evaluations, risk assessments, and POCs; document decisions, trade-offs, dependencies, risks, and remediation actions.
• Create and maintain context, logical, physical, deployment, security, network, integration, sequence, and data-flow architecture artifacts.
• Partner with product, application, engineering, security, infrastructure, risk, governance, and operations stakeholders to drive architecture decisions through implementation and closure.
• Mentor engineering teams on platform architecture standards, pattern adoption, non-functional requirements, and production-readiness expectations.

Architecture Focus Area:

• GCP Platform Architecture - Organization and project structure; landing zones; IAM; shared VPC; organization policies; GKE; compute; storage; databases; messaging; security; observability.
• Platform Engineering Architecture - Platform-as-a-product; self-service provisioning; reusable services and templates; paved-road patterns; developer experience; service lifecycle; platform APIs; onboarding and adoption.
• Infrastructure Architecture - Compute; storage; networking; routing; DNS; firewalls; load balancing; proxies; private connectivity; ingress and egress; certificates; secrets; key management.
• Cloud-Native Engineering - Kubernetes and GKE; CI/CD; GitOps; infrastructure as code; policy as code; configuration automation; software supply chain; developer enablement.
• Cloud Security & IAM - Workforce and workload identity; federation; service accounts; least privilege; encryption; secrets management; segmentation; auditability; security monitoring.
• Resilience & Operations - High availability; multi-zone and multi-region design; disaster recovery; backup; observability; incident readiness; SRE practices; production support.
• Application Modernization - Migration strategies; containerization; microservices; API enablement; event-driven patterns; data integration; legacy-platform interoperability.
• Governance & Controls - Architecture governance; cloud guardrails; standards; risk tracking; regulatory alignment; cost controls; compliance evidence; production-readiness reviews.

What you’ll bring to the role:

• Professional experience in cloud engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, solution architecture, or a related technical discipline.
• Hands-on knowledge of Google Cloud Platform, including organizations, folders, projects, billing structures, IAM, service accounts, organization policies, shared VPCs, and landing zones.
• Experience with GCP compute, container, storage, networking, security, messaging, database, monitoring, and automation services.
• Working knowledge of Google Kubernetes Engine and Kubernetes, including private clusters, node pools, workload identity, network policies, ingress, autoscaling, upgrades, security, and resiliency.
• Working knowledge of GCP networking, including VPCs, subnets, routing, firewall policies, Private Service Connect, private service access, Cloud NAT, Cloud DNS, load balancing, VPN, and dedicated connectivity.
• Strong infrastructure foundation across compute, storage, networking, DNS, load balancing, proxies, firewalls, certificates, secrets, and key management.
• Experience with Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code technologies, CI/CD, GitOps, policy as code, automated testing, vulnerability scanning, and release governance.
• Understanding of platform engineering principles including platform-as-a-product, self-service capabilities, reusable templates, paved roads, developer experience, automation, and platform lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with cloud migration and modernization patterns including rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, containerization, decomposition, and phased migration.
• Familiarity with APIs, API gateways, microservices, event-driven architecture, messaging, caching, relational databases, and NoSQL platforms.
• Ability to define monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, audit logging, service-level indicators, and service-level objectives.
• Knowledge of high availability, disaster recovery, backup and restoration, capacity planning, performance engineering, cost optimization, and operational readiness.
• Experience creating architecture diagrams, reference patterns, standards, architecture decision records, and implementation guidance for engineering teams.
• Exposure to financial services, regulated industries, or similarly high-control environments.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience supporting large-scale cloud transformation, platform modernization, or application migration programs.
• Experience with AWS architecture and core services such as VPC, IAM, EKS, EC2, S3, RDS, KMS, Route 53, load balancing, private connectivity, and CloudWatch.
• Exposure to hybrid or multi-cloud architectures spanning GCP, AWS, enterprise data centers, and third-party providers, including identity federation and cross-cloud connectivity.
• Exposure to Digital Assets platforms, including custody technology, tokenization, blockchain integration, wallet and key-management concepts, transaction workflows, and secure connectivity to third-party providers.
• Experience supporting digital brokerage, trading, wealth management, banking, or other financial-services workloads.
• Familiarity with cloud cost management, resource optimization, capacity management, and FinOps practices.
• Familiarity with service mesh, API management, container security, software-supply-chain security, and zero-trust architecture.
• Familiarity with financial-services controls, technology-risk management, security architecture reviews, change governance, and production-readiness assessments.
• Google Cloud, AWS, Kubernetes, security, networking, or enterprise architecture certifications.

Professional Skills

• Sound technical judgment with the ability to balance security, resilience, scalability, performance, cost, portability, delivery speed, and operational complexity.
• Strong written and verbal communication for engineering, risk, governance, and leadership audiences.
• Ability to lead and contribute effectively to cross-functional technical discussions and drive decisions and actions through closure.
• Ability to translate complex technical topics into clear architecture recommendations and practical implementation guidance.
• Strong documentation discipline, analytical problem-solving skills, and attention to implementation detail.
• Ability to collaborate across organizational boundaries, mentor engineers, share knowledge, and influence without direct authority.

Expected Deliverables

• ETRADE target-state, transitional, and migration cloud platform architectures.
• GCP landing-zone, project, network, identity, security, governance, and operational architecture documentation.
• Platform engineering reference architectures, paved-road patterns, self-service blueprints, and workload-onboarding standards.
• GKE and Kubernetes reference patterns and implementation guidance.
• Infrastructure architecture artifacts covering compute, storage, networking, ingress, egress, DNS, load balancing, certificates, secrets, and encryption.
• Cloud migration and application-modernization architecture documentation.
• CI/CD, GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, policy-as-code, resiliency, observability, and operational-readiness standards.
• Architecture diagrams, decision records, implementation guides, POC documentation, risk tracking, and remediation updates.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM MORGAN STANLEY:

At Morgan Stanley, we raise, manage and allocate capital for our clients – helping them reach their goals. We do it in a way that’s differentiated – and we’ve done that for 90 years. Our values - putting clients first, doing the right thing, leading with exceptional ideas, committing to diversity and inclusion, and giving back - aren’t just beliefs, they guide the decisions we make every day to do what's best for our clients, communities and more than 80,000 employees in 1,200 offices across 42 countries. At Morgan Stanley, you’ll find an opportunity to work alongside the best and the brightest, in an environment where you are supported and empowered. Our teams are relentless collaborators and creative thinkers, fueled by their diverse backgrounds and experiences. We are proud to support our employees and their families at every point along their work-life journey, offering some of the most attractive and comprehensive employee benefits and perks in the industry. There’s also ample opportunity to move about the business for those who show passion and grit in their work.

To learn more about our offices across the globe, please copy and paste https://www.morganstanley.com/about-us/global-offices​ into your browser.

Morgan Stanley is an equal opportunity employer committed to building and maintaining a workforce that is diverse in experience and background. Our recruiting efforts reflect our strong commitment to a culture of inclusion, where individuals are hired, developed, and advanced based on their skills and talents.

Our workforce reflects a broad cross-section of the global communities in which we operate, bringing a variety of backgrounds, talents, perspectives, and experiences.

For more information, please visit: https://www.morganstanley.com/people-opportunities/eeo.