S

Volunteer Cloud Architect

Solution Community

Fully Remote
Remote - Worldwide
Worldwide
US hours

Hirezar Summary for South African Applicants

This fully remote full time position at Solution Community is open worldwide, so South Africans can apply. This role is suited for senior-level professionals. As a remote position, you can work from anywhere in South Africa — whether you're based in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, or a smaller town.

Job Description

About this Role:Cloud Architect

Location:Remote

Commitment:Part-time (volunteer, pro bono role)

Contribution Requirements:Minimum 10 hours per week; minimum 3–6 months.

Professional Volunteering: is skills‑based service performed with the same reliability, accountability, and quality expected in a paid professional role. Volunteers are core contributors whose work directly supports our mission of global compassion, collaboration, and action.

AboutSolution Community:an international 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, pioneering an innovative social platform dedicated to enabling actionable change. With volunteers from over 70 countries, we demonstrate the power of global collaboration. Our team members bring experiences from some of the world's most successful companies, including Apple, Toyota, Google, Netflix, Walmart, Meta, and many others, creating a rich tapestry of knowledge and passion.

Our Mission:To foster a global community of compassion, uniting individuals and organizations to solve the world's social problems. We bridge non-profits, businesses, philanthropists, and volunteers, empowering them to create meaningful change for current and future generations.

Our Vision:Imagine a world where every person has the opportunity to thrive — a world united by collaboration, compassion, and action. AtSolution Community, we are turning that vision into reality, driving transformative change that reshapes the future.

Position Summary:Solution Communityseeks a Volunteer Cloud Architect to design, modernize, and scale the organization's cloud infrastructure, platforms, data environments, and AI-enabled services. This role will provide technical leadership for cloud strategy, architecture governance, security, reliability, automation, and platform engineering practices across multiple initiatives.

The ideal candidate combines deep cloud architecture expertise with hands-on experience designing scalable, secure, and cost-effective solutions while collaborating with engineering, AI, DevOps, product, and business stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities
* Define and maintainSolution Community's cloud architecture strategy and roadmap.
* Design secure, highly available, and scalable cloud solutions across AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform.
* Establish cloud architecture standards, governance processes, and best practices.
* Lead architecture reviews and provide technical guidance to engineering teams.
* Design and optimize multi-tier applications, microservices, APIs, and distributed systems.
* Develop cloud-native solutions leveraging containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and managed cloud services.
* Create infrastructure-as-code solutions using Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar technologies.
* Partner with DevOps teams to improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and platform reliability.
* Design security architecture incorporating IAM, network segmentation, secrets management, compliance controls, and monitoring.
* Optimize cloud spending and resource utilization.
* Support AI, machine learning, analytics, and data platform initiatives from an infrastructure and architecture perspective.
* Mentor engineers and help develop cloud engineering capabilities across volunteer teams.

Preferred Qualifications
* 7+ years of experience in cloud engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, or solution architecture.
* Experience architecting and operating production workloads in AWS, Azure, and/or GCP.
* Strong understanding of distributed systems, high availability, scalability, resilience, and disaster recovery.
* Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, container orchestration, and cloud-native technologies.
* Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, ARM/Bicep, etc.).
* Deep knowledge of networking, security architecture, identity management, and observability practices.
* Experience designing CI/CD and DevSecOps solutions.
* Strong understanding of application architecture, APIs, integrations, and platform modernization.
* Experience collaborating with engineering, product, and business stakeholders.
* Excellent communication and technical leadership skills.

Nice-to-Have
* Cloud certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or Google Professional Cloud Architect.
* Experience supporting AI/ML platforms and data engineering workloads.
* Background in enterprise architecture or platform strategy.
* Experience with FinOps and cloud cost optimization.
* Open-source leadership or volunteer experience.

Impact

The Volunteer Cloud Architect will play a strategic role in building the foundation that enablesSolution Community's engineering, AI, data, and product teams to innovate rapidly while maintaining scalability, security, reliability, and operational excellence.

Originally posted onHimalayas

Tips for South African Applicants

Timezone Advantage

South Africa (SAST, UTC+2) overlaps well with European business hours and has a few hours of overlap with US East Coast. Mention your timezone flexibility in your application.

Salary in Context

Even without a listed salary, international remote roles typically pay 2-3x more than equivalent local positions in South Africa due to the exchange rate advantage.

Application Tips

Tailor your CV to international standards — use a clean format, highlight remote work experience, and include your English proficiency. Many SA applicants succeed by emphasising their strong work ethic and cultural adaptability.

Load Shedding Preparedness

If you're applying for a remote role, having a backup power solution (UPS, inverter, or generator) and mobile data as a backup internet connection shows employers you're prepared for South Africa's infrastructure challenges.

About Solution Community

Solution Community is a company in the Developer industry that hires remote workers from South Africa.