Infrastructure Architect

This role is fully remote with occasional visit to HQ in London.

Within the Global IT function, the IT infrastructure engineering team is managing all the design / engineering aspects of the technical infrastructure eco-system: hosting (RDC on-premises, Azure cloud), networks (data centre network, WAN, LAN), and platform components (Active Directory, SCCM,and Storage Flex pod, Netapp and VMware for Virtual Workload delivery.

The role of the Data Center Solutions Engineer is to own Data Center Engineering Solutions. Act as the trusted partner to the business, own the solutioning of business requirements through the full lifecycle of requirement, solution, delivery, and handover to operations. Includes improvement, enhancement, and development of roadmaps for current and future Netapp, Compute, VMware, USC services within the company.

The key objective for the role are:

•            Solutioning for business requirement to ensure the right solution is chosen and delivered to the business in accordance with expectations for (timeline, quality, costs)

•            Design and implement projects to enhance the engineering datacentre and hybrid cloud hosting facilities remain fit for purpose (functionality, capacity, supportability, uptime, performance, security)

•            Develop the Datacentre engineering portfolio of services and provide business consultancy to improve, enhance the current portfolio of services.

•            Act as SME on Data center services such as Netapp, UCS, VMware, F5, Firewalls, Networks, Firewalls.

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

•            Create solution and designs for new projects: understand business needs, translate into technical needs and solutions, provide several solutions as needed to act as business partner.

•            Translate new business requirements into hosting solution and create associated designs / timelines / costings.

•            Create detailed designs (at BOM / SKU level) as/if required

•            Customer consulting, requirements collection and validation, estimating project costs, developing solutions with LLD, HLD, environment documentation and delivery transition.

•            Consulting requirements, the ability to translate business requirements into standard solutions.

•            Manage capacity utilisation and forecasts working with other members of the IT organisation, and factor capacity growth into roadmap & investment plans.

•            Ensure data centre designs (storage, compute, network) are documented and keep up to date. In case of documentation gaps, create plans to address and resolve over time.

•            Knowledge and experience of providing data center services and solutions in a traditional Datacentre and Hybrid Cloud environment.

•            Knowledge and experience of VMware 6.5, 6.7 and migration / upgrade to 7.x, desirable VM application workload migration experience

•            Netapp Storage and UCS engineering, design, build and operate.

•            Netapp Storage replication, snapshots, data resilience and experience of providing BCP and DR services across data center.

•            Cisco UCS experience of Fabric, Blade chassis, M5 Blades, capacity planning and operational best practices.

•            Knowledge F5 load balancers and desirable - terraform automation.

•            Owns the engineering standards for specific technology roadmaps and supports the Head of IT Infrastructure engineering on standards and strategy roadmaps.

•            Provides engineering 3rd and 4th level support for technical domain.

•            Detail knowledge of ITIL process and Service Now – to include review, development of change plans, approval of change plans.

•            Experience of working in a highly matrixed environment, partnering with external suppliers and global teams operating across multiple time zones.

•            Team player and Self-starter with the ability to develop and build plans and work across external and internal stakeholder to obtain agreement and adoption.

•            Experience of managing service lifecycle for replacement at end of support equipment, providing, enhancing, updating, and managing replacement technologies with strategies for minimising business downtime.

•            Support and contribute to strategic discussion on hosting strategies such as hybrid cloud

•            Create and manage strong relationships with vendors / partners.

•            Contribute to share knowledge, skills and help develop the teams’ skills and overall capabilities.

QUALIFICATIONS / EXPERIENCE

Proven track record over 10+ years of managing infrastructure in a large and global environment where services must be up and performant 24x7

Hold certification from Netapp, UCS, Cisco, F5. VMware, Azure

Knowledge and experience Netapp, Cisco UCS, Flex pod, F5 and Cisco Nexus

Deep experience of data centre designs and strong expertise in at least one component of the storage/compute/network stack.

Knowledge of cloud technologies Azure or AWS is desirable.

Ability to hold vendors accountable for achieving desired business results.

Adaptive to changing business needs and the ability to work in a variety of different business situations.

Experience in delivering in high complex and dynamic environments.

Experience of Service Now, Jira, Kanban – desirable

Experience of working a fast-paced environment