Job title: Infra Architect Job location: London, UK Job type: Contract Job mode: Onsite JD: 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.