Job Summary:
Lead level professional position, reporting to the AVP of Infrastructure Engineering. Responsible for planning and design activities, assurance, and collaboration across the organization and aligned with the organizations’ strategic goals. Plays an integral role in defining and assessing the organization’s cloud journey from a DevOps perspective. Required to effectively translate business objectives and risk management strategies into specific solutions for consumption by the organization. Ensures confidentiality, integrity, availability and safety of data including cloud, network and endpoint security, strengthening a safe and secure culture in collaboration with IT teams and the business.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:
Expected to participate in the phases of the company’s SAFe Lean Portfolio Management activities including Architectural Review Board and Architecture Community of Practice. The Infrastructure Architect is expected to advocate for Infrastructure requirements and objectives as it relates to DevOps, IaaS & PaaS services, config management, IaC, and IAM implementations with security and risk management considered, while ensuring that security architectures and practices do not impede the needs of the business or negatively affect user experience. The architect will serve as a technical sounding board and will be expected to evaluate new services, vendors, applications and security tools, among other items, from a technical perspective, and to translate requirements of these activities and functions into infrastructure enablement that the AVP of Infrastructure can communicate to the organization. This is a hands-on role and will require implementation responsibilities.
Planning and Design Activities
Creates and maintains roadmaps, reference architectures, service definition, and diagrams based on sound enterprise architecture practices for Platform Engineering
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Establish tools standards for all teams to utilize in IaC and Ci/CD pipelines
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Provides forward thinking infrastructure solutions in the cloud that incorporate enablement with security being an important part of the solution.
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Develops and maintains infrastructure architecture artifacts (e.g. models, templates, standards, procedures, etc.) that can be used to leverage infrastructure capabilities in projects and operations
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Determines baseline secure configurations for operating systems, network segmentation and identity and access management, IaC, Ci/CD code scanning, and AVD.
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Drafts, maintains, educates on infrastructure standards and contributes to procedures in support of engineering and operational excellence
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Designs effective security controls to protect the company's data and infrastructure for backup and DR services
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Evaluates and integrates required security technologies and countermeasures against threats to information, privacy and compliance
Key Responsibilities:
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Serve as a hands-on architect with implementing IaC as part of a Platform Engineering team
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Design and implement cloud architectures and tools that are secure, scalable, and cost-effective.
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Collaborate with engineering and development teams to define cloud solutions and deployment strategies in line with the App/Dev group in their Ci/CD pipeline efforts
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Lead design for cloud infrastructure migration efforts and optimize existing cloud environments.
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Develop and enforce cloud governance and security policies.
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Evaluate and recommend cloud tools and services that align with business needs for IaC, config management, automation, and Ci/CD pipeline work.
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Create architecture diagrams, documentation, and operational procedures.
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Monitor cloud infrastructure performance, reliability, and costs, implementing improvements as necessary.
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Ensure compliance with industry regulations and standards (e.g., NIST, CSF 2.0, SOX, CCPA, NYDFS, and NIS 800-53).
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Stay current with new cloud technologies and industry trends to drive innovation.
Assurance Activities
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Tracks developments and changes in digital business and identifies relevant trends in infrastructure engineering, Platform Engineering, and end user computing.
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Coordinates validation of IaaS/IaC environments and Ci/Cd pipelines in Azure, and other reference architectures for deployment and security best practices and recommends changes to enhance user experience, reduce costs, and enable capability for infrastructure consumers where applicable.
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Coordinates validation of deployment configurations for Azure virtual desktop services
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Drive towards modern identity access via Okta as an integration into various cloud services
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Coordinates with Platform Engineering and application development teams to advocate secure infrastructure deployment practices and to escalate concerns related to cloud consumption.
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Reviews security requirements, tools and services, and makes recommendations on integration of security requirements.
Collaboration
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Collaborates with IT, business, and security teams to ensure that security architecture works with infrastructure solutions.
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Provides guidance on infrastructure topics, advising and collaborating on technology and enablement matters with other organizational units.
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Liaises with the business continuity management team to validate design and security practices for business continuity testing and operations when a fail over occurs.
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Liaises with the vendor management team to conduct cloud assessments of existing and prospective vendors, especially those we have existing relationships with to help support infrastructure solutions.
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Liaises with contract lifecycle management team to evaluate statements of work or agreements for providers to contracts and costs are understood.
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Liaises with other architects and practitioners to share best practices and insights, consistent with the organization’s technology roadmaps.
Qualifications:
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Education/Experience (Must meet at least two of the following criteria)
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A Bachelor’s degree in IT related field (Computer Science, Information Systems, Cyber Security Preferred)
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A Minimum of 8 years’ experience in IT with a focus on Infrastructure
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Experience with SAFe and Lean Portfolio Management activities.
Technical Experience
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Direct, hands-on with tools such as Jenkins, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, GitHub, and other automation tools
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Experience or a strong working knowledge of Azure, cloud management, and FinOps practices
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Full-stack knowledge of IT infrastructure including DevOps deployments and practices in Azure
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Strong Engineering experiencing solutioning in a DevOps environment
Industry and Regulatory Experience
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Sarbanes-Oxley Privacy Practices, NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), and CIS
Business-Related Skills
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The Cloud Architect is expected to contribute insights to colleagues in the Infrastructure team, AVP Infra Engineering and CTO, as well as Infrastructure Engineering managers, colleagues within internal audit, risk management and other line-of-business teams.
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To ensure that infrastructure-related matters are adequately conveyed, the following skills are required: Strategic planning skills Communication skills financial analysis project management
Knowledge and Skills
The Cloud Architect will be expected to demonstrate the following key behaviors and competencies as they fulfill the core responsibilities of their role:
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Adaptability
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Business Acumen
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Innovative Thinking
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Openness to Learning
Personal Characteristics
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Can interface with and gain the respect of stakeholders at all levels and roles in the company.
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