Pre-Sales Cloud Architect (Demo Environment for SaaS Platform - AWS)

Empyrean Benefit Solutions•Houston, MN

16h•Remote

About The Position

Sr Pre-Sales Cloud Architect to owns the architecture, design, and evolution of our demo, sandbox, and staging environments. This role is responsible for ensuring demo environments accurately reflect production architecture, mirror production standards, and support high-impact sales demonstrations and proof-of-concept efforts. The incumbent brings deep expertise in AWS infrastructure, strong experience in Benefits Administration systems or a similar SaaS platform, and the ability to architect scalable, repeatable, and automated demo environments. This role partners closely with Engineering, Product, Sales Engineering, DevOps, and QA to ensure demo architecture is stable, secure, aligned with production standards, and capable of supporting complex configuration scenarios.

Requirements

5-7+ years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, SaaS infrastructure, or solution architecture roles.
Strong experience supporting complex SaaS platforms, configuring SaaS platforms for client demos.
Strong experience supporting configuration-driven systems, rule-based workflows, and multi-tenant architectures. Experience with Benefits Administration, HRIS, HCM, payroll, or enrollment systems strongly preferred.
Demonstrated experience designing and implementing AWS-based environments, not solely operating them. (Required)
Demonstrated advanced experience with AWS core services (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM) and infrastructure design principles. (Required)
Infrastructure-as-Code experience (CloudFormation or Terraform). (Required)
Automation and scripting experience (Python, Bash, PowerShell). (Required)
Experience implementing or working with established CI/CD pipelines and DevOps collaboration models. (Required)
Proficiency in troubleshooting across application layers (UI, APIs, databases, integrations). (Required)
Advanced analytical and troubleshooting skills across infrastructure and application layers.
Excellent communication and documentation skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, understandable language for non-technical stakeholders.
Problem Solving: Ability to diagnose and resolve complex configuration and infrastructure challenges independently.
Technical Agility: Rapidly learns new systems, platforms, and evolving product capabilities.
Collaboration: Effectively partners with cross-functional technical and business teams.
Attention to Detail: Precision in configuring benefits rules, workflows, and environment parameters.
Customer Mindset: Understands the importance of high-quality, reliable demo experiences in supporting revenue outcomes.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with identity management and SSO (SAML, OAuth, OpenID Connect). (Preferred, Not Required)
Experience supporting sales demo environments or revenue-critical technical workflows (Preferred, Not Required)
AWS certifications are a plus.

Responsibilities

Own the technical architecture and roadmap for demo environments.
Design scalable, secure AWS-based demo architectures aligned with production design principles.
Maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot issues in demo environments to ensure high availability and optimal performance.
Configure and refresh environments to support product demos, proofs of concept, and client engagements.
Manage environment data sets, ensuring they are realistic, compliant, and aligned with demo scenarios.
Establish and maintain reusable infrastructure-as-code templates to enable rapid, repeatable provisioning.
Ensure all product functionality is fully demo-capable, including communication delivery scenarios, COBRA, ACA, and complex eligibility workflows.
Identify architectural gaps and drive continuous improvement in demo scalability, automation, and reliability.
Coordinate environment version control and release readiness in alignment with Engineering, Product, and Sales roadmaps.
Architect, configure, test and maintain complex Benefits Administration modules and workflows within demo environments.
Collaborate with Product and Sales teams to design realistic plan structures, eligibility rules, enrollment flows, life event scenarios, calculations, and integrations to reflect real-world use cases.
Serve as the internal subject matter expert on Benefits Administration functionality and demo best practices.
Troubleshoot and resolve issues related to benefits configuration, plan setup, calculations, and integrations.
Validate readiness by ensuring new product capabilities are architecturally supported within demo environments.
Support advanced/unique demo customizations required for strategic sales opportunities.
Architect, provision, and optimize AWS services supporting demo environments, including EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, networking, and infrastructure-as-code frameworks.
Implement automation to reduce manual setup time, improve repeatability, and increase reliability.
Establish repeatable environment provisioning, scaling, backups, and performance tuning.
Monitor system health, security posture, and resource utilization within AWS, proactively addressing risks/inefficiencies and responding to incidents.
Partner with Sales Engineering to design and support tailored demo configurations for complex or high-visibility opportunities.
Provide training and documentation to internal teams on environment usage and best practices.
Collaborate with Development to ensure demo environments align with CI/CD pipelines and production infrastructure patterns.