Principal Architect, California Higher Education

The Google Cloud Platform team is dedicated to helping customers transform and build their future with cloud technology, prioritizing security, reliability, and scalability across infrastructure, applications, devices, and hardware. This team assists developers, businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies in realizing the benefits of cloud technology. As a key member of a rapidly growing entrepreneurial team, you will play a crucial role in understanding customer needs and shaping how organizations of all sizes leverage technology to connect with customers, employees, and partners. As part of the Customer Engineering organization within Google Public Sector, you will lead cross-functional teams to help higher education customers in California design, plan, implement, and govern their cloud strategies. This Principal Architect, California Higher Education role is a hybrid technical and business advisor position, demanding executive-level qualities. You will lead conversations, direct the sales team's execution by blending technical direction with business insight, and collaborate with value engineering to articulate the true total value of technical solutions and the overall partnership with Google Public Sector. Google Cloud empowers organizations globally to digitally transform their businesses and industries, providing enterprise-grade solutions and tools for sustainable development to customers in over 200 countries and territories.

Minimum qualifications for this role include a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience, along with 10 years of experience as an enterprise architect or in a customer-facing role. Candidates must possess experience in cloud market insights and cloud computing across various domains such as applications, infrastructure, storage, platforms, or data. Essential qualifications also include experience engaging with and presenting to technical stakeholders and executive leaders, as well as specific experience with state, local, and higher education markets in California.

Preferred qualifications encompass experience with structured enterprise architecture practices, hybrid cloud deployments, and roadmaps for on-premise-to-cloud migrations. Ideal candidates will have experience in enterprise technology buying and evaluation processes, coupled with an understanding of computing solutions and a background in building, architecting, designing, and implementing highly distributed global cloud-based systems. Knowledge of diverse technology solutions and the ability to learn and work with new emerging technologies, methodologies, and solutions in the Cloud/IT space are also preferred. Finally, the ability to deliver results and work cross-functionally to position and orchestrate multi-product solutions is highly valued.

Your responsibilities will involve building trusted advisory relationships with accounts, engaging with Architects, VP Engineering, CTO, and CIOs to identify customer priorities, address technical objections, and design comprehensive strategies utilizing the entire Google ecosystem to deliver business value and resolve blockers. You will provide domain expertise in public cloud and enterprise technology, effectively promoting Google Cloud to customers, at conferences, and online. You will recommend integration strategies, enterprise architectures, platforms, and application infrastructure necessary for successful solution implementation, while also offering best practices to optimize Google Cloud's effectiveness for customers. Managing the enterprise architecture relationship with customers will require collaboration with specialists, product management, and technical teams. This role also requires executing onsite client-facing work at least 3 days a week.