Job Description

Infrastructure Architect
Contract duration: 12 months
Location: Cape Town
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, 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 (e.g., serverless
• 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.

Key performance indicators
Infrastructure Strategy & Alignment

• 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 config drift and accelerate onboarding.
• Cloud Modernization & Optimization 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:

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Network Engineering, or
• 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.
• Resilience, DR, Security & Observability
• 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.

Skills Required