Senior Cloud Solutions Architect

Cyber Identity Solutions; Jeddah; On-site; SAR 360,000 - 600,000; Full time

Job summary

Cyber Identity Solutions in Jeddah seeks a seasoned Senior Solutions Architect to lead infrastructure and cloud strategy, shaping a future-ready target state for a large BFSI banking environment.

You will own the infrastructure blueprint, assess current HPE-based private cloud, and drive cloud adoption with governance, cost considerations, and regulatory alignment. Strong leadership and stakeholder engagement are essential for success.

Qualifications

• 15–20 years IT experience across infrastructure and cloud.
• Experience defining an enterprise infrastructure roadmap for a large organization (banking/BFSI preferred).
• Strong understanding of resilience frameworks, DR/BCP, and high-availability design.
• Experience creating and executing a cloud strategy with governance and adoption plans.
• Familiarity with HPE private cloud / GreenLake or similar private cloud platforms is highly desirable.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the Bank's Target State Infrastructure blueprint across compute, storage, network, virtualization, DR/BCP, and hosting.
• Assess current HPE-based private cloud and chart modernization and consolidation path.
• Develop cloud strategy, operating model governance, landing zones, and workload placement criteria.
• Oversee data center and workload management, capacity planning, and technology refresh cycles.
• Engage with regulators, risk committees, and leadership to drive resilient infrastructure and cloud adoption.

Skills

Target state infra

Operational resilience

Cloud strategy

Data center know-how

HPE GreenLake

Banking regulatory

Stakeholder leadership

Private cloud

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IT

Job description

Role -Senior Solutions Architect

Industry preference - Banking & Financial Services | Technology Infrastructure & Architecture

Role Summary - KSA

We are looking for a seasoned Infrastructure & Cloud leader who brings together deep, hands-on data center and infrastructure expertise with strategic cloud architecture and adoption capability. This is not a technology-specific role it requires someone who understands the broader infrastructure landscape (compute, storage, network, virtualization, DR) and can translate that understanding into a coherent, future-ready Target State Infrastructure for the Bank, while also shaping and driving the Bank's Cloud Strategy.

The role is cloud agnostic in orientation; however, given the Bank's current environment is built on HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) private cloud infrastructure, candidates must have strong working knowledge of on-premise Data Center components and workload management, and the ability to evolve this into a logically segregated hosting model across workload types (private cloud, public cloud, hybrid, and traditional DC).

Key Responsibilities

1. Target State Infrastructure Definition

• Define and own the Bank's Target State Infrastructure (TSI) blueprint covering compute, storage, network, virtualization, DR/BCP, and hosting architecture.
• Assess the current infrastructure landscape (largely HPE-based private cloud) and identify the roadmap to modernize, consolidate, or transition components.
• Establish architecture principles, standards, and reference models that guide infrastructure investment decisions for the next 3 5 years.
• Work closely with enterprise architecture, security, and application teams to ensure infrastructure design aligns with business and regulatory needs.

2. Operational Resilience Assessment

• Assess the Bank's current Operational Resilience capabilities across infrastructure and hosting environments.
• Identify key gaps in areas such as high availability, disaster recovery, failover design, capacity management, and incident response readiness.
• Recommend and drive improvement initiatives to strengthen resilience, aligned with regulatory expectations (business continuity, RTO/RPO, third-party/vendor resilience).
• Partner with risk and compliance teams to embed resilience requirements into infrastructure design and change processes.

3. Cloud Strategy Development

• Develop and articulate the Bank's overarching Cloud Strategy, including target direction (private/public/hybrid mix), guiding principles, and adoption roadmap.
• Define the cloud operating model governance, landing zones, workload placement criteria, and cost/FinOps considerations.
• Evaluate when and how workloads should move to public cloud vs. remain on private cloud/on-prem, based on regulatory, security, latency, and cost factors.
• Ensure the strategy remains cloud agnostic, avoiding vendor lock-in, while being pragmatic about the Bank's current HPE private cloud investment.

4. Data Center & Workload Management

• Bring strong understanding of Data Center (DC) components servers, storage arrays, networking, virtualization layers, and private cloud platforms (HPE GreenLake / HPE private cloud experience preferred).
• Understand workload characteristics (transactional, batch, analytics, core banking, digital channels) and define principles for logical segregation of workloads across hosting environments.
• Guide decisions on which workloads are best suited for private cloud, public cloud, or traditional infrastructure, based on performance, compliance, and cost.
• Oversee DC capacity planning, technology refresh cycles, and rationalization initiatives.

5. Stakeholder Engagement & Governance

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior technology and business leadership on infrastructure and cloud direction.
• Engage with regulators, auditors, and risk committees as needed on infrastructure resilience and cloud adoption matters.
• Manage relationships with key infrastructure and cloud vendors/partners.
• Build and mentor a team of infrastructure and cloud architects/engineers.
• Required Skills & Experience
• 15 20 years of overall IT experience, spanning both Infrastructure/Data Center and Cloud domains not a pure cloud-only or pure infra-only background.
• Proven experience defining a Target State Infrastructure or enterprise infrastructure roadmap for a large, complex organization (banking/BFSI strongly preferred).
• Strong understanding of Operational Resilience frameworks and practices gap assessment, DR/BCP, high availability design.
• Demonstrated experience developing and executing a Cloud Strategy target direction, adoption approach, governance model.
• Hands-on or strong working knowledge of Data Center components: compute, storage, networking, virtualization, backup/DR.
• Experience with HPE private cloud / HPE GreenLake or comparable private cloud/converged infrastructure platforms is highly desirable.
• Ability to think technology-agnostically comfortable evaluating infrastructure landscape and workload placement without being tied to one vendor or stack.
• Experience working within a regulated banking/financial services environment, with understanding of regulatory expectations around infrastructure resilience and cloud adoption.
• Strong stakeholder management, communication, and leadership skills ability to influence senior leadership across architecture, security, risk, and business functions.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field; relevant certifications (TOGAF, AWS/Azure/GCP, ITIL, DC/infrastructure certifications) are a plus.
• Preferred Attributes
• Prior experience in a similar Bank or large BFSI institution, ideally having led an infrastructure or cloud transformation program.
• Exposure to multiple cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) in addition to private cloud, even without hands-on multi-cloud delivery.
• Experience building the business case and roadmap for hybrid cloud adoption in a legacy-heavy, on-premise-first environment.
• Strong analytical and structured thinking ability to assess the 'as-is' landscape and translate it into a pragmatic, phased 'to-be' state.
• What Success Looks Like in This Role
• A clearly defined, leadership-endorsed Target State Infrastructure roadmap.
• A documented Operational Resilience gap assessment with a prioritized remediation plan.
• An approved Cloud Strategy with clear target direction and adoption approach.
• A workload-to-hosting-environment mapping framework that guides future infrastructure decisions.