Infrastructure Architect

Optimal Growth Technologies; Midrand; On-site; ZAR 800,000 - 1,100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology firm in Midrand seeks an Infrastructure Architect to define and maintain target-state infrastructure architecture, drive cloud strategies, and embed security principles. With at least 8 years in infrastructure roles, candidates should have robust knowledge in cloud technologies and high-availability environments. This 12-month contract role emphasizes compliance and modernization in infrastructure designs.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in infrastructure or cloud architecture roles in high-availability environments.
• Experience with platform engineering and secure enclave deployment.
• Domain experience in Financial Services and financial technologies is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the target-state infrastructure architecture.
• Lead the roadmap for infrastructure modernization.
• Drive hybrid and multi-cloud architecture strategy.
• Embed security-by-design principles into infrastructure blueprints.

Skills

High-availability infrastructure design

Data center architecture

Cloud network architecture

Hybrid cloud design

Infrastructure-as-code (IaC)

Container orchestration (Kubernetes)

Zero Trust Architecture

Penetration testing

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Splunk

Job description

Infrastructure Architect

Duration: 12 months

Location: Midrand

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.

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
• 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.

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:

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Network Engineering,
• 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.
• 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