Infrastructure Architect – SC Cleared in West End, London

Infrastructure Architect/TDA
Permanent
Remote
SC Cleared

The Infrastructure Architect role bridges the gap between the Solution Architect, development team, business team and project management. The Infrastructure Architect role will define, validate and promote the right Infrastructure for a bid, a deal or a project.
Specifically the Infrastructure Architect is able to build logical models of networks, infrastructure components and interfaces, to contribute to the development of infrastructure architectures in specific business or functional areas. These models will reflect the Infrastructure architecture views and can be mapped to the solution architecture. The Infrastructure Architect produces detailed component specifications and translates these into detailed designs for implementation using selected products.
The role to be filled is to act as a Technical Design Authority. Working with someone we have operating/maintaining a largely heritage hosting platform, and the client who is using those hosting services for the operation of their business applications. Therefore, an understanding of the different technologies that may operate within an on-premise ecosystem to deliver a hosting service and how they integrate to provide those services is a key holistic skillset. This will then inform assurance/governance function that covers both design documents and operational change artefacts against a largely heritage infrastructure solution which is comprised of:
* Sun and HP servers - physical app/database clusters and VMware hypervisor clusters [ESXi 4.x/5.x]
* Server Guest OS (whether virtual or physical) are primarily REHL4.x, Win2003, Solaris 10
* Cisco routers, switches, firewalls
* F5 load balancers
* Cisco fabric switches
* EMC storage arrays (Clariion and VNX)
* Oracle backup infrastructure (tape library based with legacy NetBackUp solution)
Not to suggest that the TDA needs to be an expert in any of these, that is what the sub-contractor SME's who operate and maintain the heritage platform do.
The role of the Infrastructure Architect is to:
* Act as the focus of an Infrastructure Team developing Infrastructure solutions, contributing general technical knowledge and experience.
* Set and manage stakeholder expectations regarding infrastructure.
* Assess current and emergent technology, giving advice on price and performance.
* Develop relationships with infrastructure product vendors.
* Align the technology with the business and customer goals, identifying benefits and risk mitigation approaches associated with the proposed solution.
* Apply appropriate technical standards.
* Ensure infrastructure risks are managed, in particular non-functional requirements, including availability, scalability and performance.
* Support formal and informal technical reviews to assure quality of the infrastructure solution design.
* Own the list of infrastructure concerns, architectural decisions and contributes to the technical risk register.
* Coordinate plans and actions with project manager to make best use of available resources, including specialists such as service architects.
* Own collated infrastructure effort estimates and costs from teams, subcontractors and suppliers for one or more subsystems.
* Support the development of team members by knowledge sharing and mentoring.

Key Skills:
* Ability to write and communicate on proposals at an architectural level.
* Ability to present Infrastructure solutions to clients.
* Ability to review technical designs to ensure that the requirements are met.
* Ability to share knowledge at an architect level.
* Ability to identify, assess and mitigate technical and non-technical issues and risks.
* Ability to generate reliable cost estimates for infrastructure elements of small to medium sized projects.
* Experience of capacity and performance assessment.

Disclaimer:

This vacancy is being advertised by either Advanced Resource Managers Limited, Advanced Resource Managers IT Limited or Advanced Resource Managers Engineering Limited ("ARM"). ARM is a specialist talent acquisition and management consultancy. We provide technical contingency recruitment and a portfolio of more complex resource solutions. Our specialist recruitment divisions cover the entire technical arena, including some of the most economically and strategically important industries in the UK and the world today. We will never send your CV without your permission.