IT Infrastructure Architect

Infrastructure/Domain Architect
6 Month Contract£500 a day Inside IR35Remote with occasional site visits (London)
MUST BE UK BASED AND ELIGIBLE FOR SC CLEARANCE (or already have it)
DXP Talent is hiring for an Infrastructure Architect with a background in delivering Data Centre migrations and who has particular experience with Solaris and AIX.
Working on a Government data centre migration project, you'll bring broad infrastructure knowledge across AIX, Solaris, physical servers, virtualisation, networks, storage and security and understand the full migration lifecycle and translate technical requirements into practical designs, reusable migration patterns and clear delivery mechanisms.

Additionally, you'll be working closely with various teams to challenge technical assumptions and guide migrations from discovery through production cutover and operational handover.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead infrastructure migration architecture across the assigned estate, aligning designs with client requirements, security controls and programme standards.

• Assess existing infrastructure, applications, databases and interfaces to establish migration scope, dependencies, compatibility constraints and risks.

• Define appropriate approaches for physical to physical, physical to virtual and virtual to virtual migrations, including relocation, rehosting, rebuilding, replication and recovery where appropriate.

• Create reusable architecture patterns, design templates, technical standards and migration decision frameworks.

• Produce high level designs and work with technical specialists to develop and assure low level designs.

• Establish repeatable delivery mechanisms covering discovery, design, build, testing, migration readiness, cutover, hypercare and service transition.

• Define migration waves and sequencing, accounting for application dependencies, business priorities, data volumes, connectivity and permitted downtime.

• Ensure designs address network routing, firewall rules, segmentation, DNS, IP addressing, load balancing, identity, privileged access and encryption.

• Incorporate storage, backup, recovery, capacity, availability and performance requirements into migration designs.

• Develop and review migration runbooks, rehearsal plans, cutover procedures, rollback approaches and validation criteria.

• Support design assurance, technical readiness assessments and go or no go decisions.

• Provide technical leadership during migration execution, resolving issues with platform, network, security, application and database teams.

• Work with IBM, client stakeholders and delivery partners to manage design decisions, technical exceptions and dependencies.

• Define operational acceptance, knowledge transfer and source decommissioning requirements.

Essential Experience & Skills

• Demonstrable experience as a Domain Architect, Infrastructure Architect or Migration Architect on complex enterprise data centre migration programmes.

• Direct experience supporting migrations through discovery, design, implementation, production cutover and operational handover.

• Strong working knowledge of AIX and IBM Power environments, including LPARs and VIOS.

• Strong working knowledge of Solaris environments, including relevant SPARC or x86 platform considerations and virtualisation technologies.

• Proven experience designing physical to physical and physical to virtual migrations, with a clear understanding of processor architecture, operating system compatibility, hypervisor limitations and vendor support.

• Broad infrastructure knowledge spanning Windows, Linux, virtualisation, storage, networking, security, backup and disaster recovery.

• Experience identifying application and database dependencies and selecting suitable data transfer, replication and synchronisation approaches.

• Ability to define recovery time and recovery point objectives, migration acceptance criteria and post migration validation.

• Experience producing clear architecture documentation, reusable design patterns and practical engineering guidance.

• Confidence leading technical workshops and explaining options, risks and trade offs to engineers, delivery managers and senior stakeholders.

• Experience working within formal architecture governance, change control and service acceptance processes.

If you feel like you'd be a great for for the role then we'd love to hear from you!
DXP Talent LTD is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome applications from all individuals regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation