Description

Job Description

The cloud infrastructure architect role helps teams (such as product teams, platform teams and
application teams) successfully adopt cloud infrastructure and platform services. It is heavily involved in
design and implementation activities that result in new or improved cloud-related capabilities, and it brings
skills and expertise to such areas as cloud technical architecture (for a workload’s use of infrastructure as
a service [IaaS] and platform as a service [PaaS] components); automating cloud management tasks,
provisioning and configuration management; and other aspects involved in preparing and optimizing
cloud solutions.
Successful outcomes are likely to embrace infrastructure-as-code (IaC), DevOps and Agile ways of
working and associated automation approaches, all underpinned by the cloud infrastructure engineer’s
solid understanding of networking and security in the cloud. The nature of the work involved means that
the cloud infrastructure engineer will directly engage with customer teams, but will also work on cloud
infrastructure platform capabilities that span multiple teams.
The cloud infrastructure architect collaborates closely with other architects, product/platform teams,
software developers, Cloud Engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), security, and network specialists,
as well as other roles, particularly those in the infrastructure and operations. Being an approachable
team-player is therefore crucial for success, and willingness to lead initiatives is important too. 
The cloud infrastructure engineer also supports colleagues with complex (escalated) operational
concerns in areas such as deployment activities, event management, incident and problem management,
availability, capacity and service-level management, as well as service continuity.

The cloud infrastructure architect is expected to demonstrate strong attention to detail and a customer-
centric mindset. Inquisitiveness, determination, creativity, communicative and collaboration skills are
important qualities too.

Key Responsibilities
 Provide expert knowledge on cloud infrastructure and platforms solutions architecture, to
ensure our organization achieves its goals for cloud adoption. This involves translating cloud
strategy and architecture into efficient, resilient, and secure technical implementations.
 Define cloud infrastructure landing zones, regional subscriptions, Availability Zone, to
ensure HA, resiliency and reliability of Infrastructure and applciations
 Offer cloud-engineering thought leadership in areas to define specific cloud use cases, cloud
service providers, and/or strategic tools and technologies
 Support cloud strategy working on new cloud solutions including analysing requirements,
supporting technical architecture activities, prototyping, design and development of infrastructure
artifacts, testing, implementation, and the preparation for ongoing support.
 Work on cloud migration projects, including analyzing requirements and backlogs, identifying
migration techniques, developing migration artifacts, executing processes, and ensuring
preparations for ongoing support.
 Design, build, deliver, maintain and improve infrastructure solutions. This includes
automation strategies such as IaC, configuration-as-code, policy-as-code, release orchestration
and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and collaborative ways of
working (e.g., DevOps). Participate in change and release management processes, carrying out
complex provisioning and configuration tasks manually, where needed.
 Research and prototype new tools and technologies to enhance cloud platform capabilities.
Proactively identify innovative ways to reduce toil, and teach, coach or mentor others to improve
cloud outcomes using automation.
 Improve reliability, scalability and efficiency by working with product engineers and site
reliability engineers to ensure well-architected and thoughtfully operationalized cloud
infrastructures. This includes assisting with nonfunctional requirements, such as data protection,
high availability, disaster recovery, monitoring requirements and efficiency considerations in
different environments.
 Provide subject matter expertise for all approved IaaS and PaaS services, respond promptly
to escalated incidents and requests, and build reusable artifacts ready for deployment to cloud
environments.
 Exert influence that lifts cloud engineering competency by participating in (and, where
applicable, leading) organizational learning practices, such as communities of practice, dojos,
hackathons and centers of excellence (COEs). Actively participate in mentoring. Practice
continuous improvement and knowledge sharing (e.g., providing KB articles, training and white
papers).
 Participate in planning and optimization activities, including capacity, reliability, cost
management and performance engineering.
 Establish FinOps Practices — Cloud Cost management, Scale up/down, Environment
creation/deletion based on consumption

 Work closely with security specialists to design, implement and test security controls, and
ensure engineering activities align to security configuration guidance.
 Establish logging, monitoring and observability solutions, including identification of
requirements, design, implementation and operationalization.
 Optimize infrastructure integration in all scenarios — single cloud, multicloud and hybrid.
 Convey the pros and cons of cloud services and other cloud engineering topics to others at
differing levels of cloud maturity and experience, and in different roles (e.g., developers and
business technologists). Be forthcoming and open when the cloud is not the best solution.
 Work closely with third-party suppliers, both as an individual contributor and as a project lead,
when required. Engage with vendor technical support as the customer lead role when
appropriate.
 Participate/Lead problem management activities, including post-mortem incident analysis,
providing technical insight, documented findings, outcomes and recommendations as part of a
root cause analysis.
 Support resilience activities — e.g., disaster recovery (DR) testing, performance testing and
tabletop planning exercises.
The role holder is also expected to:
 Ensure that activities are tracked and auditable by leveraging service enablement systems,
logging activity in the relevant systems of record, and following change and release processes.
 Collaborate with peers from other teams, such as security, compliance, enterprise architecture,
service governance, and IT finance to implement technical controls to support governance, as
necessary. Work in accordance with the organization’s published standards and ensure that
services are delivered in compliance with policy.
 Promptly respond to requests for engineering assistance from technical customers as needed.
Provide engineering support, present ideas and create best-practice guidance materials. Strive to
meet service-level expectations.
 Foster ongoing, closer and repeatable engagement with customers to achieve better, scalable
outcomes.
 Take ownership of personal development, working with line management to identify development
opportunities.
 Work with limited guidance, independently and/or as part of a team on complex problems,
potentially requiring close collaboration with remotely based employees and third-party providers.
 Follow standard operating procedures, propose improvements and develop new standard
operating procedures to further industrialize our approach. Advocate for simplification and
workflow optimization, and follow documentation standards.

Skills and Experience
Skills and Experience in the following activities/working styles is essential:
 Collaboration with developers (and other roles, such as SREs and DevSecOps Engineers) to
plan, design, implement, operationalize and problem solve workloads that leverage cloud
infrastructure and platform services.

 Working in an infrastructure or application support team.
 Cloud migration project experience. [Data center to Cloud IAAS, Cloud Native, Hybrid Cloud]
 Securing cloud platforms and cloud workloads in collaboration with security teams.
 Familiarity or experience with DevOps/DevSecOps.
 Agile practices (such as Scrum/Sprints, Customer Journey Mapping, Kanban).
 Proposing new standards, addressing peer feedback and advocating for improvement.
 Understanding of software engineering principles (source control, versioning, code reviews, etc.)
 Working in an environment that complies with Health and, Manufacturing
 Event-based architectures and associated infrastructure patterns
 Experience working with specific technical teams: [R&D teams, Data and analytics teams, etc.]
 Experience where immutable infrastructure approaches have been used
 Implementing highly available systems, using multi-AZ and multi region approaches
Skills and experience in the following technology areas:
 Experience with Azure, GCP, AWS, SAP cloud provider services (Azure and SAP preferred)
 Experience with these cloud provider services is preferred: Infra, Data, App, API and Integration
Services
 DevOps-tooling such as CI/CD (e.g., Jenkins, Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps/ADO, TeamCity,
GitHub, GitLab)
 Infrastructure-as-code approaches, role-specific automation tools and associated programming
languages (e.g., Ansible, ARM, Chef, Cloud Formation, Pulumi, Puppet, Terraform, Salt, AWS
CDK, Azure SDK)
 Orchestration Tools (e.g., Morpheus Data, env0, Cloudify, Pliant, Quali, RackN, VRA, Crossplane,
ArgoCD)
 Knowledge of software development frameworks/Languages; [e.g., Spring, Java, GOlang, PHP,
Python]
 Container management (e.g., Docker, Rancher, Kubernetes, AKS, EKS, GKE, RHOS, VMware
Tanzu)
 Virtualization platforms (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V)
 Operating systems (e.g., Windows and Linux including scripting experience)
 Database technologies and caching (e.g., Postgres, MSSQL, NoSQL, Redis, CDN)
 Identity and access management (e.g., Active Directory/Azure AD, Group Policy, SSO, cloud
RBAC and hierarchy and federation)
 Monitoring tools (e.g., AWS CloudWatch, Elastic Stack (Elastic Search/Logstash/Kibana),
Datadog, LogicMonitor, Splunk)
 Cloud networking (e.g., Subnetting, Route Tables, Security Groups, VPC, VPC Peering, NACLS,
VPN, Transit Gateways, optimizing for egress costs)
 Cloud security (e.g., key management services, encryption, other core security services/controls
the organization uses)
 Landing Zone Automation solutions (e.g., AWS Control tower)
 Policy guardrails (e.g., policy-as-code approaches, cloud provider native policy tools, Hashicorp
Sentinel, Open Policy Agent)
 Scalable architectures, including APIs, microservices and PaaS.

Key Skills

Education

Any Graduate