(Hybrid)​ Inside IR35 - £550 per day

Overview

The PLE Architecture team partners with the other technology architecture domains to:

1. Deliver high quality technology solutions

2. Deliver cost effective solutions leveraging standard patterns

3. Improve time to market for delivery of services

4. Comply with regulatory, audit & security controls

5. Drive productivity & sustainability

The PLE Infrastructure Architecture team is comprised of:

- Lead Architects responsible for short, medium and long-term strategy for the PLE infrastructure and design

- Solution Architects responsible for infrastructure architecture designs which align with overall technical strategy and patterns

Purpose of the Role

The primary purpose of the role is to deliver high quality Infrastructure Architecture and Solution Designs that satisfy the needs of the Production Like Environment (PLE) programme requirements and complies with CTO and Cybersecurity standards.

The Lead Infrastructure Architect will also critically review and endorse designs and solution artefacts (e.g. patterns) from other Solutions Architects in the programme, ensuring they align with the overall enterprise infrastructure architecture standards

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The role focuses on both Architecture:

• Determine business requirements and create corresponding high level and solution designs to meet them

• Understand the impact to upstream and downstream services of technology choices and implementations

• Ensure logical design contributes to programme and technology objectives

• Consider service placement requirements and re-use opportunities

And Design:

• Delivering end to end technical infrastructure designs (HLD’s & SDD’s), ensuring Non-Functional Requirements are realised and validated

• Verify impact to adjacent services/systems and Validate deployment and support model

• Qualify technical acceptance of all components

• Review designs and gain approval via the architecture governance framework (e.g. relevant Architecture Review Groups and Design Authorities)

• Optimize commercials and approval

Desirable Experience

A system engineering background and the ability to compare and contrast different solutions to meet a business requirement is essential. Provide technical thought leadership to meet the business requirements and influence key stakeholders leading to adoption. Have conceptual functional and non-functional knowledge of some of the following areas:

• Data centre hardware infrastructure (servers, networking, storage)

• Server operating systems internals (Linux, Windows, Solaris)

• Security technologies such as firewalls, HSMs, proxy servers, IDS/IPS, network segmentation tools

• Server virtualization, for example VMware, Xen, Hyper-V or KVM

• Identity Access Management (e.g. Active Directory, LDAP, Privileged Access Management tools)

• Middleware technologies such as Websphere, Tomcat, Java, Messaging, Application Server or Web server

• Storage technologies e.g. EMC/Pure Storage / SAN – FC, FCoE, iSCSI, SRDF; NetApp NAS, CIFS, NFS; Object storage

• IBM Mainframe technologies, zOS, CICS, MQ, IWS, OPS/MVS

• Networking (e.g. Cisco/F5 devices, TCP/UDP, Broadcast/Multicast, LAN/WAN, SDN)

• Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (e.g. Jenkins, GitHub, Nexus)

• Automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet or Terraform

• Database technologies e.g. Oracle, PostgreSQL, MS-SQL, NoSQL datastores

• High availability and BCDR techniques such as clustering (VCS & MSCS), data replication etc

• Collaboration tools (e.g. MS Teams, Confluence, Jira)

• Cloud technologies such as Google GCP, Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, as well as APIs, Kubernetes and the ecosystem

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Candidates will also need to demonstrate:

• A track record of delivering significant change which improves business effectiveness in sustainable ways

• Excellent written and spoken communication skills with experience of successfully influencing senior stakeholders, negotiating effectively and winning over audiences with compelling and persuasive presentations

• Set and achieved challenging short, medium and long term goals which exceeded the standards in their field

• Proven experience of leading others and creating an environment that supports and inspires people to develop and deliver

• Built effective networks both internally and externally and created opportunities for others to work collaboratively

• Passion for technology & understanding how things work

• A track record of making complex business decisions with authority, even in times of ambiguity, considering the potential long term risks and implications