Cape Town: Infrastructure Architect posted by Tower Group

Key Responsibilities
Infrastructure Architecture & Planning

Define and maintain the target-state infrastructure architecture across data centres, cloud platforms, and edge environments.
Lead the roadmap for infrastructure modernization including virtualization, hyperconverged systems, containerization, and network overlays.
Establish infrastructure patterns and blueprints for compute, storage, backup, disaster recovery (DR), and network architectures.
Align infrastructure strategy with enterprise architecture principles, performance objectives, and service-level agreements (SLAs).

Cloud and Hybrid Enablement

Drive hybrid and multi-cloud architecture strategy across AWS, Azure, and private cloud (e.g. OpenStack, VMware).
Architect secure, compliant infrastructure-as-code pipelines, integrating Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools.
Guide cloud landing zone design, VPC architecture, identity federation, and interconnect strategies.
Ensure observability, cost governance, and elasticity in cloud-native workloads.

Security, Resilience & Compliance

Embed security-by-design principles into infrastructure blueprints, including micro segmentation, encryption and zero-trust access.

Architect HA/DR solutions across critical systems, ensuring geographic redundancy and failover readiness.
Ensure infrastructure compliance with PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and local regulatory requirements.
Support infrastructure risk assessments and penetration testing preparation.
Governance & Collaboration
Participate in Architecture Review Boards to assess infrastructure impact and conformance to strategy.
Collaborate with DevOps, SRE, security, and operations teams to promote infrastructure reliability and automation.
Engage with vendors, cloud providers, and technology partners for capability assessment and solutioning.
Produce and maintain infrastructure architecture documentation, standards, and runbooks.

Key performance indicators
Infrastructure Strategy & Alignment

Deliver infrastructure blueprint aligned to EA target architecture within 90 days.
Define scalable deployment topologies for critical systems (e.g., mobile money platforms, APIs, microservices clusters).
Champion use of infrastructure blueprints and reusable templates to reduce config drift and accelerate onboarding.

Cloud Modernization & Optimization

Enable at least 3 legacy workloads for cloud readiness with full infra-as-code deployment.
Design secure, multi-cloud landing zones with federated identity, policy enforcement, and network segmentation.
Develop migration playbooks and automated cutover strategies to enable safe cloud transitions.
Resilience, DR, Security & Observability
Deploy observability and automation across ?60% of critical systems.
Establish platform SLAs and work with Tech Ops to monitor, improve uptime and performance.
Ensure all infra configs comply with internal baselines and pass automated security scans.
Integrate infra security with SIEM, SOAR, and vulnerability tools in collaboration with cybersecurity teams.

Technical Experience:
Essential:

8+ years in infrastructure or cloud architecture roles in high-availability environments.
Strong background in data center and cloud network architecture, compute and virtualization, storage and backup, hybrid cloud design, IaC and automation, CI/CD and infrastructure observability.
Experience with platform engineering, service mesh, and secure enclave deployment.
Familiarity with Fintech or payments-grade infrastructure standards.
Clear understanding of layered security, zero trust, and identity federation.
Demonstrated hands-on experience architecting Infrastructure: Hybrid/multi-cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes), IaaS/PaaS adoption models.
Deep understanding of architectural implications for regulatory compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI-DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001).
Experience integrating Zero Trust Architecture, identity management (OAuth2, OpenID, SAML), and encryption protocols into enterprise design.
Familiarity with architecture risk assessments, threat modelling, and secure-by-design principles.
Strong experience in designing high traffic, scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure.
Understanding of cloud architecture and services (e.g., serverless computing, containerization, orchestration).
Experience leading or supporting large-scale modernization or transformation programs (e.g., core banking revamp, mobile money overhaul, ERP replacement).

Desirable:
Kubernetes cluster design and day-to-day operations experience.
Experience integrating 3rd-party observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Splunk).
Exposure to edge computing, CDN integration, and mobile backend scaling strategies.
Cloud certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Architect Expert).
Experience of continuous delivery and release automation processes.
Knowledge and interest in market leading Payments technologies, suppliers and innovations
Understanding of technical and architectural policies and ability to transform that policy into detailed technical design.
Experience in Vendor assessment and technical due diligence for major platform selections.

Desirable technical / professional qualifications:
Educational Qualifications:

Bachelors or Masters degree in computer science, Information Systems, Network Engineering, or related field, or equivalent work experience.
8 years technical background inclusive of infrastructure architecture experience
Domain experience in Financial Services and Financial technologies will be an added advantage
Has demonstrable knowledge and experience in both Agile and Waterfall methodologies

Budget owned: None