Infrastructure Architect

Hybrid: 2 days per week in Manchester

6 months+ (5 years of work) Day rate contract

In short: Classic Infrastructure Architect with skills across public and private cloud, VM Ware, Windows / Linux, IAAS, AD, Containers and some F5 (ideally) required to join a major bank in designing infrastructure solutions that a 3rd party will implement.

In full: We work alongside Engineering Leads to understand application requirements in order to draw out infrastructure designs; ensuring compliance with the bank’s patterns, standards and strategy. Once a design is created and internal teams and 3rd party suppliers mobilised we coordinate technical delivery to ensure your design is delivered to plan.

Our purpose is to enable, facilitate and transform infrastructure change for our customers. Ensuring our services are performant, secure, supportable, resilient, strategic and cost-effective.

What do we do?

• We align with an IT team responsible for a banking product or service, where we work proactively to influence their strategy, whilst translating their business requirements and specifications into infrastructure designs; exploring delivery options, documenting decisions and iterating ideas as you go.
• Providing consultancy and cost estimates, to ensure your business can budget accordingly and make informed strategic decisions.
• Using your experience of leading Suppliers, SMEs and Supply Lines to write work packages that are clear, understood and delivered on time.
• Taking a lead in all aspects of infrastructure throughout the delivery lifecycle, including:

• Working with PMs and Delivery Leads to formulate plans and understand costs.
• Engaging suppliers and internal delivery teams.
• Coordinating build activities with internal or 3rd party service providers.
• Supporting through testing cycles.
• Collaborating with service owners to ensure systems are properly tested and supported following go-live.

And beyond the technical elements, we...

• Are responsible for ensuring that the design is implemented by providing technical leadership in support of projects and initiatives.
• Produce cost estimates for infrastructure change to support budgetary planning.
• Provide demand planning forecasts for internal and 3rd party resources to reduce risk of supply.

So what about your skills and experience...

• Experienced in the design/architecture of infrastructure solutions in a large-scale enterprise environment, e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Middleware, Storage, Network and Databases.
• Skilled at producing quality concise design documentation, with an emphasis on decisions and diagrams necessary to mobilise delivery.
• Hands-On experience of end-to-end project delivery, working with Agile (Scrum) and Waterfall delivery models including modern software development and deployment practices.
• Understanding of building applications through containerised microservices-based architectures, with a working understanding of cloud methodologies.
• Experienced in migrating legacy applications to cloud based solutions (both to in house private cloud and external e.g. GCP or Azure).
• Technologies we would be expecting experience in (not necessarily all but an awareness) – Windows Server, Linux, UNIX, SQL, oracle, Websphere, SAN infrastructure, VmWare, Citrix, IBM P Series, Oracle Hardware, HP and Lenovo plus a good experience of networking technology such as F5.

Candidates will ideally show evidence of the above in their CV in order to be considered.

Please be advised if you haven’t heard from us within 48 hours then unfortunately your application has not been successful on this occasion, we may however keep your details on file for any suitable future vacancies and contact you accordingly. Pontoon is an employment consultancy and operates as an equal opportunities employer.