About Us

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) is charged with implementing the state's public school laws for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade public schools at the direction of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and State Board of Education.

Description of Work

This is a time-limited position. It is full-time (40 hours per week) with State Benefits for a limited time. If you have questions concerning the time-limited status of this position, you may inquire at the interview.

The Cloud Architect provides senior technical leadership for the design, implementation, and maturation of DPI’s enterprise cloud environment. The Cloud Architect works with business stakeholders, technical teams, cybersecurity, data teams, application teams, vendors, and agency leadership to translate business needs into practical cloud solutions that are secure, supportable, and aligned with DPI’s long-term technology strategy.

Job Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, and mature secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective cloud solutions that meet DPI business, technical, security, compliance, and operational requirements.
• Design and guide implementation of cloud landing zones, network segmentation, subscription and resource organization, identity integration, policy enforcement, logging, monitoring, tagging, and cost governance.
• Develop and maintain cloud architecture frameworks, standards, reference architectures, design patterns, and implementation guidance for DPI cloud environments.
• Design observability, monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards, operational metrics, backup, disaster recovery, and incident response readiness patterns for cloud-hosted systems.
• Develop and guide operational practices that ensure cloud infrastructure remains secure, supportable, resilient, highly available, and production-ready.
• Apply cloud financial management practices, including tagging, budget monitoring, rightsizing, cost visibility, reserved capacity analysis, consumption governance, and cost optimization.
• Ensure cloud infrastructure and cloud-based solutions are designed to meet applicable security, privacy, compliance, regulatory, and audit requirements.
• Develop and guide security architecture patterns, including least privilege access, role-based access control, identity federation, managed identities, private connectivity, encryption, key management, logging, and policy-based guardrails.
• Collaborate with cybersecurity, identity, infrastructure, data, and application teams to ensure cloud solutions are secure, auditable, resilient, and aligned with DPI and State requirements.
• Support architecture review and governance processes for cloud services, cloud migrations, application modernization, data platform services, vendor-hosted solutions, SaaS platforms, and third-party integrations.
• Provide cloud architecture leadership for School Business Systems Modernization, including infrastructure and integration patterns for finance, HR, payroll, grants, allotments, reporting, data exchange, and vendor connectivity.
• Design cloud-enabled infrastructure and integration patterns that support DPI, Public School Units, vendors, statewide systems, and enterprise data platforms.
• Collaborate with data architecture and data engineering teams to ensure cloud environments support scalability, security, data classification, access control, lineage, observability, and cost management.

Knowledge Skills and Abilities/Management Preferences

Recruitment Range: $105,341.00 - $130,000.00

Manager Preferences:

• Experience within an education or government environment, particularly working within the NC structure.
• Experience designing, implementing, or maturing Microsoft Azure cloud environments, including landing zones, hub-spoke networking, private endpoints, Azure Firewall, Entra ID integration, Azure Monitor, Key Vault, Azure Policy, and cloud cost governance.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, preferably Terraform, and Git-based deployment workflows.
• Experience supporting cloud architecture for enterprise data platforms such as Azure Databricks, Azure Data Lake Storage, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Snowflake, or comparable platforms.
• Experience designing secure integration patterns for APIs, SFTP, managed file transfer, vendor connectivity, hybrid data exchange, and cloud-to-on-premises integration.
• Experience supporting public sector, education, ERP, finance, HR, payroll, grants, procurement, or enterprise modernization initiatives.

Important: This posting closes at 11:59:59 PM the night BEFORE the End Date above.

If you have student loans, becoming a state employee includes eligibility for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. Visit www.studentaid.gov to learn more.

Primary Purpose of the Office of Enterprise Architecture:

The Office of Enterprise Architecture provides strategic and technical leadership for DPI’s enterprise technology architecture, modernization planning, and technology governance. The Office develops target-state architectures, solution designs, standards, design patterns, and roadmaps that align systems, data, applications, infrastructure, and cloud services with agency business needs, statutory requirements, security expectations, and operational priorities. The Office works with DPI business units, technology teams, agency leadership, vendors, the Department of Information Technology, and Public School Units to support enterprise systems modernization, systems consolidation, application portfolio management, data infrastructure, data platform, improved interoperability, reduced fragmentation, and more secure, sustainable, and efficient technology services.

Minimum Education and Experience

Some state job postings say you can qualify by an “equivalent combination of education and experience.” If that language appears below, then you may qualify through EITHER years of education OR years of directly related experience, OR a combination of both. See the Education and Experience Equivalency Guide for details.

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering or closely related degree from an appropriately accredited institution and six years of progressive IT experience including four years of experience related to cloud architecture design and/or implementation; or Associate degree in computer science, information technology, or a closely related field from an appropriately accredited institution and seven years of progressive IT experience including five years of experience related to cloud architecture design and/or implementation; or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

EEO Statement

The State of North Carolina is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer and dedicated to providing employees with a work environment free from all forms of unlawful employment discrimination, harassment, or retaliation. The state provides reasonable accommodation to employees and applicants with disabilities; known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; and for religious beliefs, observances, and practices.