Role : Infrastructure Architect Location : Northamptonshire Working arrangements - On-site/Hybrid (4 days in office) Salary : Up to £80K benefits Industry- Retail/Wholesale building materials (Joinery) Purpose : Our client, a prominent wholesale supplier in the joinery and kitchen sector, is seeking an experienced Infrastructure Architect to guide the technical design and continuous enhancement of their network and infrastructure technology landscape. This position plays a critical role in identifying system improvements, maximizing technology investments, and ensuring that all changes align with established standards and the company's strategic objectives. Key Responsibilities: Monitor emerging technologies and innovations to identify improvement opportunities and collaborative engagements, ensuring alignment with business objectives and continuous technological progression. Develop and maintain infrastructure strategies in close collaboration with other technology domains, ensuring a unified and forward-thinking technology roadmap. Define and uphold infrastructure artefacts including design principles, policies, standards, roadmaps, and strategies, ensuring a consistent and structured approach to development. Maintain detailed documentation of the current network infrastructure and technology portfolio, identifying potential areas for investment, improvement, or consolidation to guide future planning. Design innovative technical patterns and processes to drive efficiency in operations and delivery, enhancing overall performance while managing costs. Serve as the technical authority within assigned projects, offering strategic and tactical governance to ensure solutions are practical, robust, and aligned with business goals. Produce high-level reference architecture alongside Key Design Decisions (KDDs), and support the creation of Low-Level Design (LLD) documents to provide a clear blueprint for implementation. Review and support project solutions, ensuring adherence to architectural standards, performance benchmarks, scalability, security, and resilience requirements. Lead proof-of-concept technology implementations and present findings and demonstrations to stakeholders to validate and promote new solutions. Provide expert guidance and presentations to both technical teams and senior management, facilitating well-informed technology and design decisions. Champion architectural best practices across the IS department, fostering collaboration with Application and Solution Architects to ensure a unified and effective technology strategy. Required Experience : Experience across a range of infrastructure technologies including but not limited to: Cloud infrastructure and Services Infrastructure as Code Microsoft 365 Virtualisation technologies Networking Security Database technologies Storage Windows servers Windows clients AIX and Linux servers Experience in infrastructure designs (IaaS and PaaS) Excellent understanding of best practice infrastructure and network architectures Broad knowledge of IT and industry best practices A good working knowledge of IP, Ethernet, routing and switching within LAN/WAN/Data Centre/ Public Cloud environments Understanding of Software Defined Networking Experienced in network security products, for example Firewalls, IPS/IDS, VPN Knowledge and use of product management methodologies and Agile Framework ADZN1_UKTJ