INFRASTRUCTURE ARCHITECT
Location: London (hybrid working)
Salary: £120,000 - £155,000 + Benefits
Type: Permanent (Senior Manager, IT Architecture)
About the Role
My client is seeking an experienced Infrastructure Architect to join a leading financial markets and commodities institution headquartered in London. In this senior strategic leadership role within their IT Architecture department, you will provide enterprise-level oversight, direction, and governance across all infrastructure domains.
The ideal candidate would be able to drive top-down strategic thinking, connecting disparate business and technology needs to establish a coherent, standardized approach aligned with enterprise-level vision.
Operating in a matrix environment with a balanced mix of on-premises environments, bare metal infrastructure, and pragmatic cloud solutions, you will play a crucial role in providing overarching context, challenging legacy paradigms constructively, and guiding stakeholders across global regions.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership & Governance: Provide senior strategic direction and governance for enterprise-level infrastructure engagements, ensuring alignment with internal policies, standards, and overall Enterprise Architecture objectives.
Cross-Domain Integration: Look across different infrastructure domains to join the dots, identify interdependencies, and provide an overarching view that bridges business and technology drivers.
Technology Standards & Roadmaps: Participate in technology product evaluation, define enterprise infrastructure standards, and formulate technical roadmaps and strategies in collaboration with technical leads and vendors.
Stakeholder Engagement & Influence: Act as a trusted advisor, engaging with senior IT and non-IT stakeholders across global regions to articulate complex concepts, broker compromises, and drive fit-for-purpose solutions.
Architecture Documentation & Guidance: Author and edit high-quality architecture artefacts, maintain documentation libraries, and provide architectural guidance on design and engineering best practices.
Essential Skills & Experience My client is ideally looking for:
Enterprise Architecture Experience: Proven track record operating as a senior Infrastructure Architect at an enterprise level (financial services experience is advantageous, but broader enterprise experience with a strong grasp of complex corporate environments is welcome).
Infrastructure & Technical Depth: Strong understanding of infrastructure design principles, risk management, cloud, on-premise infrastructure and bare metal experience, coupled with a pragmatic approach to evolving legacy ecosystems.
Strategic & Top-Down Thinking: Demonstrated ability to think top-down, extracting clarity from ambiguity, driving organizational change, and providing senior strategic direction rather than purely bottom-up technical execution.
Communication & Influence: Exceptional communication and presentation skills with the agility to adapt styles for diverse stakeholders, navigate technical and organizational complexity, and influence senior leaders holding differing remits.
Professional Certifications: Relevant industry certifications, such as TOGAF, are highly desirable.
What Next...
If you are a strategic, self-driven infrastructure leader ready to shape enterprise architecture direction at a global institution, we'd love to hear from you. Apply today!
GCS is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.
