Director / Executive Director, Infrastructure Architect

Location: London (2-3 days a week)
Type: Permanent
Package: £175,000 + Bonus

The Role

A leading international bank in London is hiring a senior Infrastructure Architect to own its target-state infrastructure across end-user compute, data centres, and cloud. The aim is to bring three historically separate estates together into one coherent, cost-managed platform.

This is a consolidation and exit role as much as a design role. Success is measured by estate reduction, not estate growth. You'll sit in the Architecture function of the bank's Innovation, Data, Engineering & AI team, reporting to the Head of Architecture.

What You'll Deliver

• A published target-state infrastructure architecture and placement policy, endorsed at Design Authority
• An agreed and sequenced data centre exit plan, with named workloads, waves, and dates
• An approved VDI consolidation roadmap, with the first platform migration wave delivered
• A baseline infrastructure cost model and a committed, measurable path to reducing it

What You'll Do

• Define the target-state architecture across VDI, physical, and colocated data centres, and public cloud, with a clear policy on what runs where and why
• Lead the data centre rationalisation programme: workload discovery and dependency mapping, migration wave planning, exit sequencing, and lease and contract alignment
• Consolidate the VDI and end-user compute estate, including brokers, images, profile management, and licensing, and set the roadmap toward a single strategic platform
• Design cloud landing zones, network topology, identity integration, and hybrid connectivity to support migration at scale
• Set infrastructure standards for compute and storage tiering, virtualisation, backup, patching, and infrastructure-as-code
• Own resilience architecture: DR tiering, RTO/RPO, and failover design and testing, aligned to operational resilience requirements
• Build and maintain the infrastructure cost model, driving unit economics, capacity forecasting, and rightsizing
• Partner with network, security, EUC, and platform engineering teams to sequence dependencies and avoid stranded estate
• Provide assurance at Design Authority, and challenge project decisions that create new estate outside the target state