Cloud Architect at a Dublin cloud company: €120k with Dublin relocation

I'd been passively open to opportunities for a few months when a specialist cloud recruiter reached out on LinkedIn with a role that was worth reading past the first line. A Dublin cloud company was rebuilding their Azure platform team from the ground up, and they wanted a senior architect who'd actually designed for scale, not just talked about it in theory. The recruiter had done their homework before messaging me. The pitch was specific, the timing was right, so I agreed to an exploratory call. Within the first week I'd had an initial screen with the recruiter and moved quickly into the loop itself. Over the next two weeks I went through five rounds. The early stages were conversational: culture fit, broad technical background, how I handled stakeholder communication on large infrastructure projects. Then it escalated fast. The hardest piece was a 90-minute whiteboard session focused entirely on multi-region failover strategy. They handed me a realistic, messy scenario and expected me to reason through trade-offs out loud, justify my decisions, and push back on constraints that didn't make sense. It was hard, and I respected that. Right after came a written architecture document with a 48-hour turnaround. I spent most of those ↓