Infrastructure Architect

Job Title: Infra Architect (Sponsorship will not be provided)

Job Location: Guildford Business Park Guildford Surrey GU2 8XG

Job Type: Contract Inside IR35/FTC (6 months duration)

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).