Infrastructure Architect

Tower Group South Africa; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 800 000 - 1 200 000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology services firm in Cape Town seeks an experienced Infrastructure Architect to oversee the design and optimization of multi-cloud infrastructure. Responsibilities include defining architectural blueprints, leading modernization efforts, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Candidates should possess 8+ years of experience in high-availability environments, strong technical skills in cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, and a degree in a relevant field. This position offers competitive benefits in a collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in infrastructure or cloud architecture roles in high-availability environments.
• Strong background in data center and cloud network architecture.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience architecting hybrid/multi-cloud architectures.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain target-state infrastructure architecture across data centres and cloud platforms.
• Lead the roadmap for infrastructure modernization including virtualization and containerization.
• Participate in Architecture Review Boards for strategy conformance.

Skills

Infrastructure architecture

Cloud architecture

Hybrid cloud design

IaC and automation

CI/CD

Security by design

Data center networking

Regulatory compliance frameworks

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, Information Systems, or related field

8 years of technical background in infrastructure architecture

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Kubernetes

AWS

Azure

Job description

Key Responsibilities

• 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. Open Stack, 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 ******, 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

• 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 configuration drift and accelerate onboarding.
• 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.
• 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 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 *****).
• Experience integrating Zero Trust Architecture, identity management (OAuth2, Open ID, 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.

Educational Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's 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.