Infrastructure / Platform Architect

Our client is a global IT services company.

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Job Description:

Our client is committed to building diverse, inclusive teams. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and particularly encourage interest from women, underrepresented groups, and neurodivergent candidates. We offer reasonable adjustments throughout the hiring process and are dedicated to creating a supportive, accessible environment for everyone.

Infrastructure / Platform Architect (System Design Team )

Location: Farnborough (onsite 5 days per week)

Due to the nature of the work and the customers we support, the successful candidate must be eligible to meet UK Government and contractual personnel security requirements, including the applicable residency requirements for the role, and have the right to work in the United Kingdom. Some roles may also be subject to nationality requirements where these are necessary to meet UK Government or contractual security obligations.

The Infrastructure / Platform Architect is a senior, customer-facing architecture role within the customer's multidisciplinary System Design Team (SDT). The SDT operates on behalf of the customer, maintains the end-to-end Solution Architecture and provides governance and assurance of solution designs produced by delivery organisations. The role contributes infrastructure and platform expertise across private cloud, virtualisation, container platforms, compute, storage, networking and shared platform services. It works closely with customer stakeholders, security assurance personnel and delivery partners to help ensure that designs are coherent, secure, supportable and aligned to the wider solution. The role provides authoritative advice within its assigned scope, while respecting the decision rights and accountabilities defined by the customer. The emphasis is on architecture governance, design assurance, cross-domain coordination, and technical influence. Delivery suppliers remain accountable for producing their supporting Service Designs, High-Level Designs (HLDs), Low-Level Designs and implementation artefacts.

Working Relationships

• Customer architecture leadership and other SDT disciplines, including security and applications.
• Security assurance staff, risk owners, accreditors / assurance authorities and operational stakeholders.
• Solution-provider architects, service designers, engineers, programme teams, test teams and service management.
• Architecture boards, design reviews, technical working groups and SAFe delivery forums.

Key Responsibilities

Infrastructure and Platform Architecture

• Contribute to the development and maintenance of the infrastructure and platform viewpoints within the end-to-end Solution Architecture.
• Provide architecture guidance across VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), NSX, compute, storage, backup, recovery, networking, management and shared platform services.

Design Assurance and Governance

• Review and assure supplier-produced Service Designs, HLDs and supporting artefacts against agreed requirements, policies, standards and architectural direction.
• Work constructively with supplier designers from an early stage to clarify intent, identify dependencies and reduce avoidable design rework.

Security, Identity and Risk

• Apply Secure by Design principles and support continual security assurance throughout the capability lifecycle.
• Work with security specialists, risk owners and accreditors / assurance authorities to ensure infrastructure designs provide appropriate evidence for security and risk decisions.
• Assess platform integration with IAM, IDAM / IGA, PAM, authentication, federation, directory services, service identities and break-glass arrangements.

Platform Engineering and Programme Support

• Provide architecture guidance for container platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift and VMware Tanzu, where applicable to the solution.
• Promote repeatable and supportable infrastructure-as-code and configuration-management practices using tools such as Ansible, Terraform and controlled Git-based workflows.
• Contribute to integration, test, migration, transition and operational-readiness planning, including cross-service dependencies and acceptance evidence.

Customer and Stakeholder Engagement

• Provide clear infrastructure and platform advice to customer stakeholders and architecture leadership within the scope delegated to the role.
• Facilitate workshops and design reviews, presenting options, risks and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences.

Essential Requirements

• Substantial IT infrastructure experience, including significant experience in infrastructure, platform or solution architecture roles.
• Experience generating, reviewing and assuring Service Designs and HLDs in complex, multi-supplier or regulated environments.
• Credible customer-facing experience, with the ability to influence senior stakeholders, architects and engineering teams.

Technical and Architecture Knowledge

• Strong knowledge of enterprise infrastructure architecture across compute, storage, network, backup, recovery, virtualisation, platform management and observability.
• Strong VMware VCF and NSX knowledge, including platform lifecycle, resilience, management and workload considerations.
• Understanding of Kubernetes and container platforms, such as OpenShift or VMware Tanzu.
• Understanding of infrastructure automation and configuration management, including tools such as Ansible and Terraform, Git-based workflows and CI/CD controls.
• Familiarity with IAM, IDAM / IGA, PAM, authentication, federation and enterprise directory services.
• Experience of Secure by Design, security assurance and technical risk management.

Personal Attributes

• Strategic perspective combined with sufficient technical depth to assess designs and challenge supporting evidence.
• Ability to operate effectively where responsibilities are shared across customer, SDT and delivery-supplier organisations.

We believe strong connections and community are key to our success. Our work model prioritizes in-person collaboration while offering flexibility to support wellbeing, productivity, individual work styles, and life circumstances. We're committed to fostering an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive.

Recruitment fraud is a scheme in which fictitious job opportunities are offered to job seekers typically through online services, such as false websites, or through unsolicited emails claiming to be from the company. These emails may request recipients to provide personal information or to make payments as part of their illegitimate recruiting process. Our client does not make offers of employment via social media networks and our client never asks for any money or payments from applicants at any point in the recruitment process, nor ask a job seeker to purchase IT or other equipment on our behalf. xwwtmva More information on employment scams is available here.

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