Job title: Infra Architect
Job location: London, UK
Job type: Contract
Job mode: Onsite
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## Role Summary
An Infrastructure Technical Architect is responsible for designing, delivering, and sustaining scalable, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure solutions that support business applications and services. This role partners with engineering, security, operations, and business stakeholders to define architecture roadmaps, technical standards, and best practices across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
## Key Responsibilities
- Design and architect infrastructure solutions across cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) and on-premises environments to meet performance, availability, security, and compliance requirements.
- Define and maintain infrastructure reference architectures, standards, and patterns for networking, compute, storage, virtualization, containers, and platform services.
- Lead infrastructure transformation initiatives such as cloud migrations, platform consolidations, and modernization projects.
- Collaborate with application architects, DevOps, and security teams to ensure integration, automation, and secure configuration of platforms and services.
- Drive infrastructure automation using IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM, Ansible, etc.) and CI/CD practices to reduce manual effort and improve consistency.
- Evaluate new infrastructure products and services; run POCs and vendor assessments to recommend cost-effective solutions.
- Create capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost-optimization strategies; provide lifecycle management guidance for infrastructure components.
- Define and support disaster recovery, business continuity, backup, and high-availability strategies and plans.
- Produce and maintain architecture artifacts: solution diagrams, runbooks, standards, technical proposals, and ROI/impact assessments.
- Mentor and coach engineering and operations teams on architecture best practices, design reviews, and technical decisions.
- Participate in incident reviews and postmortems to recommend architecture or process changes to reduce recurrence.
## Required Experience & Qualifications
- Proven experience designing and delivering enterprise infrastructure solutions across cloud and on-premises environments.
- Hands-on experience with at least one public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and strong understanding of cloud-native services and architectures.
- Solid background in networking (routing, switching, LB, VPN, DNS), virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V), and storage technologies.
- Experience with containers and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes) and related tooling.
- Strong knowledge of security controls for infrastructure: identity & access management, network segmentation, encryption, and vulnerability management.
- Experience implementing infrastructure automation and IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, etc.).
- Familiar with monitoring, observability and logging solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, etc.).
- Experience in high-availability, DR planning, backup technologies, and capacity planning.
- Excellent communication skills and experience presenting architecture and trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent experience.
## Preferred Certifications
- Cloud certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect, or Google Professional Cloud Architect.
- Infrastructure and architecture certifications: TOGAF, Cisco CCNA/CCNP, VMware VCP.
- Certifications in security or DevOps tools are a plus (e.g., CISSP, CISM, HashiCorp Certified).
## Behavioral & Leadership Competencies
- Strategic thinker with pragmatic delivery focus.
- Strong problem-solving and decision-making under ambiguity.
- Ability to influence across multiple teams and senior stakeholders.
- Mentoring and team enablement mindset.
- Customer-centric approach and attention to operational excellence.
## Success Metrics / KPIs
- Reduction in unplanned downtime and incident recurrence related to infrastructure.
- Successful delivery of migrations and platform projects within scope, time, and budget.
- Measurable improvement in automation coverage and deployment consistency.
- Infrastructure cost optimization metrics and improved resource utilization.
- Adoption of architecture standards and reduction in ad hoc platform implementations.
## Working Context
- Works closely with Development, Security, Operations, and Product teams.
- May require occasional travel for stakeholder meetings or vendor engagements.
- Role can be onsite, hybrid, or remote depending on company policy.