Solution Architect - Defence

Solutions Architect

• Location: Bristol (North East/ with Parking)
• Job Type: Full-time/4 days on site
• Salary £67,056 to £72,107

Solutions Architect to play a strategic and hands-on role in the design, development, and governance of enterprise infrastructure solutions across secure on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments. This role is crucial within a highly regulated defence environment, focusing on Microsoft-based enterprise ecosystems alongside virtualisation, networking, and storage platforms. The successful candidate will define scalable, resilient, and supportable infrastructure architectures that meet both operational and business requirements.

Day-to-day of the role:

• Produce high-level and low-level infrastructure designs (HLDs and LLDs) across various environments, ensuring alignment with business, operational, and technical requirements.
• Define and maintain enterprise infrastructure standards, reference architectures, and design principles covering compute, storage, networking, virtualisation, and hybrid integration.
• Lead technical discovery activities to assess existing infrastructure environments, identify technical debt, dependencies, and opportunities for modernisation.
• Translate business requirements into scalable and resilient infrastructure designs in collaboration with project managers, architects, and technical teams.
• Provide architectural governance across the project lifecycle, ensuring solutions are reviewed and aligned to enterprise standards and technical direction.
• Evaluate infrastructure technologies and architectural options, producing recommendations that balance performance, resilience, maintainability, cost, and operational impact.
• Define infrastructure migration strategies, including workload placement, phased transition approaches, rollback planning, and service continuity considerations.
• Produce and maintain architecture documentation, including HLDs, LLDs, reference architectures, and standards.
• Identify, assess, and manage technical risks, assumptions, constraints, and dependencies throughout project delivery, ensuring appropriate mitigation strategies are defined.
• Provide technical leadership and design assurance during implementation, ensuring delivered solutions remain aligned to the approved architecture.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Minimum 8+ years of experience in IT Infrastructure, with a strong focus on infrastructure design, solution architecture, or enterprise engineering roles in complex environments.
• Strong technical knowledge of Microsoft-based infrastructure and extensive hands-on experience with enterprise virtualisation technologies.
• Proven experience designing and delivering on-premises and hybrid infrastructure architectures, including integration with public cloud platforms.
• Strong understanding of enterprise networking principles, including segmentation, routing, firewall integration, and hybrid connectivity.
• Demonstrable experience producing and assuring HLDs and LLDs within infrastructure transformation or modernisation programmes.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate complex infrastructure designs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Awareness of Cyber Security tooling and configuration.