AWS Architect / Migration Lead

Primary Responsibilities

• Define and drive the lift-and-shift migration strategy, roadmap, migration factory approach, and execution plan across all migration waves.

• Review and validate discovery outputs, workload classifications, dependency mapping, and migration wave plans to ensure migration readiness.

• Own end-to-end migration delivery governance from a Cognizant perspective, covering scope, schedules, milestones, risks, dependencies, and quality objectives.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership and architectural guidance for AWS target environments, including compute, storage, networking, security, and operational readiness.

• Coordinate closely with client SMEs, AWS ProServe, application owners, infrastructure teams, database teams, and Cognizant offshore migration pods.

• Lead migration wave planning, readiness reviews, cutover planning, execution oversight, and go-live activities.

• Act as the primary escalation point for migration-related technical challenges, deployment issues, cutover risks, and cross-functional dependencies.

• Drive status reporting, risk management, issue management, and executive stakeholder communications, ensuring alignment across all participating teams.

• Ensure migration quality, runbook compliance, performance validation, rollback readiness, and operational acceptance across all migration waves.

• Support troubleshooting and resolution of issues related to migrated servers, operating systems, databases, network connectivity, security controls, and application dependencies.

• Oversee migration factory operations, including migration tooling, automation processes, workload tracking, and migration execution governance.

• Ensure adherence to security, compliance, audit, and regulatory requirements throughout the migration lifecycle.

Secondary Responsibilities

• Validate landing zone, connectivity, account structure, security controls, and environment readiness with client and AWS teams.

• Review and approve migration runbooks, SOPs, cutover plans, rollback procedures, and migration best practices.

• Guide and mentor migration engineers and offshore migration teams during planning, execution, and stabilization phases.

• Support testing coordination, defect resolution, business validation activities, and hypercare stabilization following migrations.

• Drive automation adoption through migration factory tooling, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), scripting, and operational efficiencies.

• Coordinate dependency management across infrastructure, application, network, database, security, and operations teams.

• Facilitate knowledge transfer and transition of migrated workloads to operations and managed services teams.

• Participate in governance reviews, architecture discussions, milestone assessments, and executive reporting activities.

• Support continuous improvement initiatives by identifying opportunities to optimize migration processes, tooling, and delivery models.

• Ensure migration documentation, execution records, lessons learned, and operational handoff artifacts are completed and maintained.

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong experience leading large-scale VMware, physical server, and cloud migration programs.

• Proven experience managing migration factories, migration waves, cutover activities, and workload modernization initiatives.

• Deep understanding of AWS infrastructure services, networking, security, identity management, and operational best practices.

• Experience with migration tooling such as AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), Cloud Migration Factory (CMF), AWS Transform, and related migration technologies.

• Strong knowledge of Windows and Linux server platforms, networking, storage, and enterprise infrastructure environments.

• Experience coordinating infrastructure, application, database, security, and operations teams in complex migration engagements.

• Strong troubleshooting, risk management, stakeholder management, and delivery governance skills.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to interact effectively with executives, technical teams, and client stakeholders.

• Experience supporting regulated, government, or highly governed environments is preferred.

• AWS Certifications and migration-related certifications are highly desirable.