Infrastructure Architect

INFRASTRUCTURE ARCHITECT
Location: London (hybrid working)Salary: £120,000 - £155,000 + BenefitsType: Permanent (Senior Manager, IT Architecture)
About the Role My client is seeking an experienced Infrastructure Architect to join a leading financial markets and commodities institution headquartered in London. In this senior strategic leadership role within their IT Architecture department, you will provide enterprise-level oversight, direction, and governance across all infrastructure domains. The ideal candidate would be able to drive top-down strategic thinking, connecting disparate business and technology needs to establish a coherent, standardized approach aligned with enterprise-level vision.
Operating in a matrix environment with a balanced mix of on-premises environments, bare metal infrastructure, and pragmatic cloud solutions, you will play a crucial role in providing overarching context, challenging legacy paradigms constructively, and guiding stakeholders across global regions.
Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership & Governance: Provide senior strategic direction and governance for enterprise-level infrastructure engagements, ensuring alignment with internal policies, standards, and overall Enterprise Architecture objectives.
• Cross-Domain Integration: Look across different infrastructure domains to join the dots, identify interdependencies, and provide an overarching view that bridges business and technology drivers.
• Technology Standards & Roadmaps: Participate in technology product evaluation, define enterprise infrastructure standards, and formulate technical roadmaps and strategies in collaboration with technical leads and vendors.
• Stakeholder Engagement & Influence: Act as a trusted advisor, engaging with senior IT and non-IT stakeholders across global regions to articulate complex concepts, broker compromises, and drive fit-for-purpose solutions.
• Architecture Documentation & Guidance: Author and edit high-quality architecture artefacts, maintain documentation libraries, and provide architectural guidance on design and engineering best practices.

Essential Skills & Experience My client is ideally looking for:

• Enterprise Architecture Experience: Proven track record operating as a senior Infrastructure Architect at an enterprise level (financial services experience is advantageous, but broader enterprise experience with a strong grasp of complex corporate environments is welcome).
• Infrastructure & Technical Depth: Strong understanding of infrastructure design principles, risk management, cloud, on-premise infrastructure and bare metal experience, coupled with a pragmatic approach to evolving legacy ecosystems.
• Strategic & Top-Down Thinking: Demonstrated ability to think top-down, extracting clarity from ambiguity, driving organizational change, and providing senior strategic direction rather than purely bottom-up technical execution.
• Communication & Influence: Exceptional communication and presentation skills with the agility to adapt styles for diverse stakeholders, navigate technical and organizational complexity, and influence senior leaders holding differing remits.
• Professional Certifications: Relevant industry certifications, such as TOGAF, are highly desirable.

What Next... If you are a strategic, self-driven infrastructure leader ready to shape enterprise architecture direction at a global institution, we'd love to hear from you. Apply today!

GCS is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.