Infra Architect

Job Title: Infra Architect

Job Location: Guildford Business Park Guildford Surrey GU2 8XG

Job Type: Contract/FTC (6 months duration)

Infrastructure Technical Architect Job Description

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.

Regards,

Rachana

rachana@falconsmartit.com