Lead Infrastructure Architect

Job Summary

Is responsible for defining and owning the long-term enterprise network and infrastructure architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with business objectives, capacity planning, and emerging technology trends. This role provides architectural governance, resiliency planning, and technical leadership across on premises, hybrid, and cloud-connected infrastructure environments. This position collaborates closely with engineering, cybersecurity, and cloud teams to ensure scalable, secure, and highly available infrastructure solutions.

Responsibilities

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

1. Define and maintain the long-term network and infrastructure architecture roadmap aligned with business strategy, scalability, and capacity planning objectives.
2. Design and govern physical infrastructure standards including data centers, cabling, rack layouts, power distribution, and hardware placement.
3. Lead capacity planning and performance engineering to ensure infrastructure meets current and future demand with redundancy and failover.
4. Lead network modeling, simulation, and validation activities to ensure design integrity and reduce deployment risk.
5. Design and maintain high-availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity network architectures.
6. Evaluate and manage strategic vendors, carriers, and service providers to ensure architectural alignment and cost efficiency.
7. Develop and maintain high-level and low-level design documentation and reference architectures.
8. Provide architectural oversight and governance for infrastructure projects to ensure adherence to approved standards and designs.
9. Partners with cybersecurity teams to embed security architecture principles including segmentation, zero trust, and compliance requirements.
10. Drive infrastructure automation initiatives using infrastructure as code and configuration management tools.
11. Lead root cause analysis and post-incident reviews, translating findings into architectural improvements.
12. Define, track, and report on infrastructure KPIs and SLOs for reliability, latency, and availability.
13. Guide integration of on-premises infrastructure with cloud and hybrid connectivity models.
14. Evaluate emerging technologies such as SD-WAN, SASE, EVPN/VXLAN, and high-speed fabrics for enterprise adoption.
15. Provide mentorship and architectural leadership to senior engineers and technical teams.
16. Support audits and compliance activities by ensuring infrastructure designs meet regulatory and policy requirements.
17. Contribute to budget planning, lifecycle management, and cost optimization initiatives.

Required Qualifications

Educational Requirements
Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution of higher education, preferably in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field or an equivalent combination of education and/or experience.

Required Experience
Seven (7) years of experience designing, supporting, and architecting enterprise-scale network and infrastructure environments.

Preferred Qualifications

Additional Preferred Qualifications
Industry certifications such as Cisco CCNP or CCIE, AWS Advanced Networking, Microsoft Azure Network Engineer, CompTIA Network+, or ITIL.

Preferred Educational Qualifications
An advanced degree from an accredited institution of higher learning in a related field.

Preferred Experience
Experience with hybrid cloud connectivity, private circuits, and high-availability enterprise network designs. Demonstrated experience leading architectural reviews, standards development, and infrastructure governance. Experience mentoring senior engineers or architects in complex enterprise environments.