Senior Infrastructure Architect (VP) - Governance and Platforms (CIP) in London

The Core Infrastructure Platforms (CIP) Architecture team is seeking a Senior Vice President, Infrastructure Architect to drive architectural governance and end‑to‑end design quality across IaaS and hypervisor platforms, storage, networks, and compute in a large, regulated financial environment. This is an individual contributor role focused on setting standards, conducting design reviews, and partnering closely with development and engineering teams to ensure adoption of best practices and adherence to policies, controls, and regulatory expectations. You will bring a broad, deep infrastructure background and the ability to collaborate in depth with developers and platform engineers in a complex brownfield environment.

What you’ll do:

• Lead CIP architectural governance for IaaS and virtualization platforms: define and evolve reference architectures, standards, patterns, and guardrails.
• Conduct architecture/design reviews for infrastructure and platform initiatives; document decisions, risks, and required controls; track remediation and waivers/exceptions.
• Partner with application development and platform engineering teams to guide adoption of best practices across compute, storage, network, and OS management for Windows and Linux.
• Champion automation‑first delivery: promote Infrastructure as Code and configuration management (e.g., Terraform, Ansible/Puppet/Chef) and integrate controls into CI/CD pipelines and change processes.
• Ensure non‑functional requirements are engineered in: resiliency/HA and DR, performance and capacity, observability and SLOs, security and identity, maintainability and operability.
• Align architectures with risk, cyber, compliance, resiliency, and operational risk requirements; provide traceability and evidence suitable for audits and governance forums.
• Drive lifecycle management and currency for platforms and OS: image standards, hardening, patching, upgrades, EOL/EOS mitigation, and vulnerability management.
• Develop reusable blueprints, templates, and decision guides; run design clinics and provide mentorship to engineers and solution architects.
• Measure and report on design quality and standards adoption (e.g., architecture conformance, policy adherence, technical debt reduction) to support continuous improvement.

Required qualifications:

• Significant hands‑on experience in large‑scale, regulated financial services infrastructure (typically 8–12+ years) covering IaaS and virtualization at enterprise scale.
• Deep knowledge of: Hypervisor/virtualization platforms (e.g., VMware vSphere/ESXi, KVM, Hyper‑V) and compute lifecycle management. Storage (SAN/NAS/object) and data protection concepts; networking fundamentals (L2/L3, routing, load balancing, firewalls, SDN). Windows and Linux OS engineering, image pipelines, patching/hardening, and configuration management.
• Proven experience establishing architectural standards and running architecture/design review processes, including exceptions/waivers and remediation tracking.
• Proficiency reviewing Infrastructure as Code and automation pipelines; able to assess IaC modules, policies, and controls for compliance and operability.
• Strong grounding in resiliency engineering, operational risk, change/release management, and service management practices.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and communication skills; able to translate complex infrastructure constraints for developers and non‑infrastructure audiences.
• Individual contributor with the ability to deep‑dive when needed; collaborative, low‑ego approach.

Preferred qualifications:

• Exposure to Kubernetes platform architecture and operations, container networking and security, and service mesh.
• Experience with policy‑as‑code and compliance tooling (e.g., OPA, Conftest, Sentinel) and control mapping to industry frameworks.
• Capacity planning and performance engineering experience for compute‑intensive or latency‑sensitive workloads.
• Hybrid cloud integration and landing zone experience.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., VMware, Linux, networking, ITIL, cloud).

Level and reporting:

• Senior Vice President level individual contributor; reports to the Head of CIP Architecture (or delegate). No direct people‑management responsibilities.

Work model and travel:

• London‑based; hybrid work model (insert on‑site expectations per policy).
• Occasional off‑hours support for critical changes or incidents; limited travel for team events or data center visits.

Additional information:

Role emphasizes governance and cross‑functional collaboration; not required to be a software developer but must engage deeply with developers and platform engineers to achieve outcomes.