Senior Technical Architect, Infrastructure and Cloud

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Illinois.

📋 Description

• Provide strategic direction for the advancement of corporate and cloud infrastructure, ensuring secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective business services.

• Define the current state, transition state, and target state of infrastructure and cloud architecture, along with a multiyear roadmap.

• Align infrastructure strategies with enterprise architecture principles and the overarching technology roadmap.

• Establish reference architectures, principles, standards, and patterns across cloud, data center, networking, compute, storage, containers, and backup.

• Offer guidance on infrastructure as code, policy as code, cloud governance, standards, and architectural guardrails for Azure and GCP.

• Lead infrastructure architecture reviews and contribute architectural insights on significant technical decisions.

• Scope proofs of concept and vendor evaluations; assess options, trade-offs, risks, value, operability, compatibility, and total cost.

• Recommend resilience and compliance requirements for high availability, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, and business continuity.

• Collaborate with Security Architecture on resilience, compliance, and zero-trust requirements.

• Anticipate AI and ML infrastructure needs, including compute capacity, specialized hardware, data storage, and hybrid hosting.

• Investigate emerging infrastructure technologies and provide guidance on their adoption.

• Support DT Integration, Core Systems, and Product teams with infrastructure dependencies and roadmaps.

• Partner with finance and operations on capacity planning, lifecycle management, workload placement, and FinOps.

• Utilize incidents, capacity trends, audit findings, and resilience test results to inform standards and roadmaps.

• Represent infrastructure and cloud in architecture governance forums, including the Architecture Review Board.

• Cultivate relationships with senior technology and business leaders while mentoring architects and engineers.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of progressive experience in infrastructure, cloud, platform engineering, or systems engineering, with significant architectural responsibility in complex enterprise environments.

• Proven success in defining infrastructure and cloud strategies and roadmaps that span multiple technology domains and delivery teams.

• Extensive expertise across several infrastructure domains, including cloud, networking, computing, storage, resilience, and cost management.

• Strong working knowledge of Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) architecture, encompassing landing zones, connectivity, identity dependencies, workload placement, and shared-responsibility models.

• In-depth understanding of agentic AI concepts and patterns, such as RAG, A2A, and MCP.

• Experience in integrating disparate systems and implementing enterprise integration patterns, including APIs, messaging, and event-driven architecture.

• Proven experience in defining cloud governance, guardrails, and standards within a large enterprise and driving their adoption.

• Experience in creating and governing reference architectures, standards, and architecture decision records.

• Familiarity with infrastructure as code and modern automation practices.

• Ability to evaluate architectural choices based on business value, risk, cost, and operational evidence.

• Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders and technical teams without direct authority.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills suitable for both engineering and executive audiences.

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience.

• Preferred: experience in large, global, regulated, or mission-critical environments.

• Preferred: familiarity with ITIL and CMDB alignment.

• Preferred: knowledge of TOGAF, COBIT, or equivalent frameworks.

• Preferred: experience with Agile and Scrum release planning methodologies.

• Preferred: understanding of AI/ML infrastructure requirements and zero-trust architecture.

• Preferred: experience with FinOps, technology portfolio management, and infrastructure cost modeling.

• Preferred: relevant architecture, cloud, networking, security, or infrastructure certifications.

• Preferred: experience in guiding vendor strategy or major platform selection.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health plans

• Flexible spending accounts

• 401(k) Plan with company match

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)

• Matching donations

• Flexible time away policy

• Family leave programs

• Options for remote or flexible work personas (depending on assigned work location)