Associate Director, Microsoft Cloud Architect, Cyber Resilience and Recovery

Deloitte (UK); Belfast City District; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Deloitte UK is seeking an experienced Cloud Architect to lead cyber resilience and recovery programs for financial services and other sectors. You will design reference architectures across on‑premises, hybrid and multi‑cloud environments and advise senior client stakeholders.

In this senior, client‑facing role, you will mentor engineers, contribute to assets and patterns, and help grow the practice by shaping thought leadership and engaging in bids and industry forums.

Qualifications

• Extensive design and delivery experience in enterprise cloud and hybrid architectures.
• Proven ability to advise senior stakeholders on resilience and recovery strategies.
• Strong knowledge of regulatory expectations (FCA/PRA/BoE) and risk controls.

Responsibilities

• Define cyber resilience and recovery reference architectures across on-prem, hybrid and multi-cloud.
• Design isolated recovery environments, immutable backups and rapid restoration capabilities.
• Act as trusted advisor to senior client stakeholders on resilience strategy and roadmaps.
• Lead architecture workstreams, ensuring quality, risk control and end-to-end coherence.
• Balance cloud-first goals with regulatory, third-party and data protection needs.
• Embed resilience testing, threat-led exercises and recovery validation with clients.
• Build external eminence through thought leadership and participation in forums.
• Mentor architects and engineers, contribute to patterns and pipelines, support bids.

Skills

Azure architecture

Cloud security

Resilience design

Stakeholder engagement

BC/DR

Regulatory knowledge

Public speaking

Multi-cloud

Tools

Azure

Azure Site Recovery

Microsoft Defender

Job description

Belfast, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Manchester

Business Line

Job Type

Permanent / FTC

Date published

06-Oct-2026

25390

Connect to your Industry

Deloitte's Engineering practice is at the forefront of transforming businesses by bringing together cutting-edge tech programme delivery, quality assurance, and testing expertise. We empower clients to modernise their core business through our deep capabilities in application and infrastructure engineering, cloud strategy, transformation, and migration. Practitioners within this team continuously advance their expertise to deliver robust, innovative solutions, from initial strategy to implementation and optimization.

Deloitte is growing its resilience capability and is looking for an experienced cloud architect to lead our work on cyber resilience and recovery. Working alongside our industry teams and clients in areas such as Financial Services, Energy, Resources & Industrials, and others, you will drive the development of reference architectures that keep critical services running and recoverable in the face of cyber attack and disruption — spanning on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud service providers.

This role sits at the intersection of cloud architecture, cyber security and operational resilience. You will design how organisations protect, isolate and rapidly recover their most important business services — reconciling a cloud-first direction of travel with regulatory driven resilience obligations, including the ability to remain within impact tolerances and to recover from severe-but-plausible scenarios such as ransomware and destructive attacks.

This is a senior, client-facing role that blends two demands in equal measure: trusted advisory to senior client stakeholders on their resilience and recovery strategy, and hands‑on leadership of engagement delivery. Alongside client work, you will build Deloitte’s external eminence — authoring points of view, shaping reference materials and representing the firm at industry forums — establishing yourself and Deloitte as a recognised authority on cyber resilience and recovery in financial services.

Connect to your career at Deloitte

Deloitte drives progress. Using our vast range of expertise, we help our clients' become leaders wherever they choose to compete. To do this, we invest in outstanding people. We build teams of future thinkers, with diverse talents and backgrounds, and empower them all to reach for and achieve more.

What brings us all together at Deloitte?It’show we approach the thousands of decisions we make everyday. How we behave, our beliefs and our attitudes. In other words: our values. Whatever we do, whereverwe arein the world, welead the way,serve with integrity, take care of each other ,fosterinclusion, andcollaborate for measurable impact. These five shared values lead every decision wemake and action we take, guiding us to deliver impact how and where it mattersmost .

Connect to your opportunity

Success in this role is measured by the architectures you establish, the clients you advise, the engagements you deliver and the reputation you build for Deloitte in the sector. You will be expected to:

• Define and embed a set of cyber resilience and recovery reference architectures spanning on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, adopted as the baseline for Deloitte engagements and by clients across financial services.
• Design resilient recovery capabilities — for example isolated / clean-room recovery environments, immutable and air-gapped backups, and rapid, tested restoration — that meet stringent recovery time and recovery point objectives for critical services.
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior client stakeholders — translating important business services and impact tolerances into clear, defensible resilience and recovery architectures and pragmatic roadmaps.
• Lead the architecture workstream on complex engagements from strategy through to delivery, owning technical quality, risk and the coherence of the end-to-end solution.
• Reconcile competing demands — cloud-first ambition against operational resilience, third-party and concentration risk, and data protection obligations — into designs clients can safely operate, test and evidence to regulators.
• Strengthen clients’ ability to withstand and recover from destructive cyber events — embedding recovery testing, threat-led exercising and anomaly detection so that recoverability is proven, not assumed.
• Build Deloitte’s external eminence in resilience and recovery: authoring published points of view and thought leadership, and representing the firm at client, industry and sector forums.
• Strengthen the capability around you — mentoring architects and engineers, contributing to assets, patterns and standards, and supporting the growth of the practice’s pipeline and bids.

Connect to your skills and professional experience

The following are the core skills and experience required to be successful in this role:

• Demonstrable experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale cloud and hybrid architectures across one or more major providers (Azure preferred), including on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud patterns.
• Deep expertise in cyber resilience and recovery architecture — for example isolated recovery environments / clean rooms, immutable and air-gapped backups, backup and recovery design, cyber recovery testing, recovery assurance, and meeting demanding RTO/RPO targets for critical workloads.
• Experience designing for and recovering from destructive cyber events — ransomware and malware containment, resilient restoration, and business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) for critical services.
• A track record of developing and owning reference architectures, blueprints, patterns and target operating designs, and of setting architectural standards and design governance and technology risk controls adherence.
• Experience working in or with one of the Financial Services sector, the Energy, Resources and Industrials sector showing an understanding of the regulatory and control environment.
• A strong understanding of how operational resilience regulation shapes design — important business services and impact tolerances (e.g. FCA/PRA/Bank of England), DORA, third-party and concentration risk, and resilience testing expectations.
• Proven ability to operate as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders — shaping strategy, building the business case and articulating an authoritative point of view on resilience and recovery.
• Equally strong delivery credentials — leading architecture on complex engagements or programmes end to end, balancing business requirements against security, cost, operability and risk.
• Experience of the consulting or advisory model, or a comparable client-facing environment, with the commercial awareness to contribute to bids, proposals and practice growth.
• Excellent communication skills, able to translate complex technical concepts for both technical and executive, non-technical audiences, and to present to architecture boards or design authorities.
• A demonstrable appetite for building external eminence — thought leadership, published points of view, or speaking — or clear potential and ambition to do so.
• Deep understanding of cloud security and resilience‑by‑design principles, including Zero Trust, identity security, privileged access management and secure landing zone architectures.
• Hands‑on experience with enterprise resilience and recovery technologies such as Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, Microsoft Defender or equivalent platforms.

The following will be desirable skills:

• Recognised certifications — for example professional‑level cloud architect credentials in Azure, security certifications, and architecture frameworks such as TOGAF.
• Hands‑on familiarity with cyber recovery and immutable‑storage technologies and isolated‑recovery / cyber‑vault solutions across cloud and on‑premises platforms.
• Experience of resilience and recovery testing, scenario‑based severe‑but‑plausible