Infrastructure Architect

**Infrastructure Architect**

**Duration: 12 months**

**Location: Midrand**

**Key Responsibilities**

**Infrastructure Architecture & Planning**
- Define and maintain the target-state infrastructure architecture across data centres, cloud platforms, and edge environments.
- Lead the roadmap for infrastructure modernization including virtualization, hyperconverged systems, containerization, and network overlays.
- Establish infrastructure patterns and blueprints for compute, storage, backup, disaster recovery (DR), and network architectures.
- Align infrastructure strategy with enterprise architecture principles, performance objectives, and service level agreements (SLAs).

**Cloud and Hybrid Enablement**
- Drive hybrid and multi-cloud architecture strategy across AWS, Azure, and private cloud (e.g. OpenStack, VMware).
- Architect secure, compliant infrastructure-as-code pipelines, integrating Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools.
- Guide cloud landing zone design, VPC architecture, identity federation, and interconnect strategies.
- Ensure observability, cost governance, and elasticity in cloud-native workloads.

**Security, Resilience & Compliance**
- Embed security-by-design principles into infrastructure blueprints, including micro segmentation, encryption, and zero-trust access.

**Technical Experience**:
**Essential**:

- 8+ years in infrastructure or cloud architecture roles in high-availability environments.
- Strong background in data center and cloud network architecture, compute and virtualization, storage and backup, hybrid cloud design, IaC and automation, CI/CD and infrastructure observability.
- Experience with platform engineering, service mesh, and secure enclave deployment.
- Familiarity with Fintech or payments grade infrastructure standards.
- Clear understanding of layered security, zero trust, and identity federation.
- Demonstrated hands-on experience architecting Infrastructure:

- Hybrid/multi-cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes), IaaS/PaaS adoption models.
- Deep understanding of architectural implications for regulatory compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI-DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001).
- Experience integrating Zero Trust Architecture, identity management (OAuth2, OpenID, SAML), and encryption protocols into enterprise design.
- Familiarity with architecture risk assessments, threat modelling, and secure-by-design principles.
- Strong experience in designing high traffic, scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure.
- Understanding of cloud architecture and services
- Architect HA/DR solutions across critical systems, ensuring geographic redundancy and failover readiness.
- Ensure infrastructure compliance with PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and local regulatory requirements.
- Support infrastructure risk assessments and penetration testing preparation.

**Governance & Collaboration**
- Participate in Architecture Review
- Boards to assess infrastructure impact and conformance to strategy.
- Collaborate with DevOps, SRE, security, and operations teams to promote infrastructure reliability and automation.
- Engage with vendors, cloud providers, and technology partners for capability assessment and solutioning.
- Produce and maintain infrastructure architecture documentation, standards, and runbooks.

**Desirable**
- Kubernetes cluster design and day-to day operations experience.
- Experience integrating 3rd-party observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Splunk).
- Exposure to edge computing, CDN integration, and mobile backend scaling strategies.
- Cloud certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Architect Expert).
- Experience of continuous delivery and release automation processes.
- Knowledge and interest in market leading Payments technologies, suppliers and innovations
- Understanding of technical and architectural policies and ability to transform that policy into detailed technical design.
- Experience in Vendor assessment and technical due diligence for major platform selections.

**Educational Qualifications**:

- Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Network Engineering,
- Enable at least 3 legacy workloads for cloud readiness with full infra-as-code deployment.
- Design secure, multi-cloud landing zones with federated identity, policy enforcement, and network segmentation.
- Develop migration playbooks and automated cutover strategies to enable safe cloud transitions.
- 8 years technical background inclusive of infrastructure architecture experience
- Domain experience in Financial Services and Financial technologies will be an added advantage
- Has demonstrable knowledge and experience in both Agile and Waterfall methodologies