Job Description

Infrastructure Architect

Our Company

At FirstBank PR, we strive to be trusted advisors to our clients, and our employees are the ones that ensure we deliver on our promise of excellence in personalized customer service. Our more than 3,100 employees in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Florida share a passion for excellent customer service. We are proud of our team because they are continuously surpassing our client’s expectations.

Do you have a passion for helping customers, building relationships, and delivering extraordinary, personalized customer service? If your answer is yes, FirstBank is the number one place for you.

A Brief Overview

The Infrastructure Architect is responsible for planning, designing, and governing the Bank’s on-premises and hybrid infrastructure to meet business, application, security, and operational requirements. The role develops and maintains infrastructure architecture blueprints, standards, and technology roadmaps covering compute, storage, networking, virtualization, operating systems, and shared platform services. The Infrastructure Architect defines requirements for availability, disaster recovery, performance, capacity, automation, monitoring, and cost optimization, and provides architectural oversight throughout implementation and transition to operations. Strong communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills are essential to translating business needs into secure, resilient, scalable, and supportable infrastructure solutions.

What you’ll do

· Defines and maintains the target infrastructure architecture, principles, standards, and reference designs aligned with the Bank’s business strategy and overall Enterprise Architecture.

· Designs on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure solutions encompassing servers, operating systems, virtualization, storage, networking, and shared platform services, in collaboration with domain specialists.

· Translates business and application requirements into infrastructure specifications, evaluates solution alternatives, and documents dependencies, technical risks, implementation considerations, and cost-benefit trade-offs.

· Defines workload-placement criteria, cloud foundations, hybrid connectivity, and infrastructure integration patterns with application, network, security, and operations teams.

· Develops infrastructure sizing and capacity models, defines performance and scalability requirements, and reviews testing results against expected workloads and growth projections.

· Designs high-availability, backup, replication, and disaster-recovery architectures that support approved recovery time and recovery point objectives, and participates in recovery and failover validation.

· Partners with cybersecurity and risk teams to incorporate network segmentation, least-privilege access, encryption, hardening, vulnerability remediation, and infrastructure logging requirements into designs.

· Establishes infrastructure-as-code, configuration-management, and automation patterns that support repeatable provisioning, controlled changes, and configuration-drift reduction.

· Maintains current-state and target-state infrastructure documentation and develops modernization, migration, consolidation, and technology lifecycle roadmaps to address architectural gaps and technical debt.

· Defines monitoring, logging, alerting, maintenance, supportability, and operational acceptance requirements, including responsibilities and documentation needed for production handoff.

· Evaluates infrastructure utilization, licensing, support, and total cost of ownership, and recommends cost optimization measures without compromising approved service, security, or resilience requirements.

· Reviews infrastructure designs and implementation deliverables throughout the project lifecycle, documents architectural decisions and exceptions, and validates alignment with approved standards and change-management processes.

· Leads technical research, product evaluations, and proofs of concept to select infrastructure technologies and standard configurations based on interoperability, security, resilience, supportability, and business value.

· Develops technical requirements and evaluation criteria for infrastructure RFPs and RFIs, and assesses vendor proposals, service dependencies, and technical delivery commitments.

· Provides technical leadership, mentoring, and architectural guidance to engineering and operations teams, and supports analysis of complex infrastructure problems and long-term corrective designs.

· Collaborates across business, architecture, application, security, and infrastructure teams, communicating designs, dependencies, risks, and roadmap recommendations to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

· Bachelor's Degree or equivalent degree in a related field such as Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, MIS, Business Administration, information systems and extensive related project experience.

· Six to ten years of IT infrastructure design and implementation experience, with deep knowledge in at least two of the following disciplines: compute and operating systems, virtualization, storage and backup, networking, cloud infrastructure, or infrastructure operations, and working knowledge across the remaining areas.

· Experience designing scalable and resilient infrastructure using redundancy, clustering, load balancing, fault isolation, backup, replication, and disaster-recovery patterns.

· Experience designing infrastructure in a major cloud platform, such as Microsoft Azure or OCI, including resource organization, networking, compute, storage, governance, and hybrid connectivity.

· Working knowledge of infrastructure scripting and automation using PowerShell, Bash, or Python, and infrastructure-as-code or configuration-management tools such as Terraform, Bicep, or Ansible.

· Knowledge of infrastructure validation methods, including performance, capacity, failover, backup restoration, disaster-recovery, and operational acceptance testing.

· Working knowledge of Windows Server and Linux environments, virtualization platforms, storage architecture, and the infrastructure requirements of enterprise database and application platforms.

· Knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, routing, firewalls, load balancing, network segmentation, and private connectivity between data centers, cloud environments, and external service providers.

· Knowledge of infrastructure change, configuration, incident, and problem-management practices, including production-readiness reviews and operational handoff.

· Experience developing infrastructure capacity forecasts, technology lifecycle plans, cost estimates, and total-cost-of-ownership comparisons.

· Ability to analyze infrastructure dependencies and produce architecture diagrams, technical standards, migration plans, and documented design decisions.

· Experience defining infrastructure monitoring, logging, alerting, and service-health requirements, and using operational data to guide capacity, performance, and reliability improvements.

Competencies

· An enterprise-wide understanding of infrastructure services and how they support business capabilities, application workloads, and operational requirements.

· Ability to identify infrastructure dependencies, single points of failure, capacity constraints, configuration inconsistencies, and opportunities to consolidate shared services.

· Ability to apply infrastructure architecture principles to deliver secure, resilient, scalable, supportable, and cost-effective solutions.

· Ability to develop current-state and target-state infrastructure models and phased migration roadmaps aligned with service requirements, technology lifecycles, and capital planning.

· Proficiency in infrastructure diagramming, dependency mapping, capacity analysis, and documentation of architectural decisions.

· Experience planning infrastructure implementations, migrations, upgrades, and operational transitions across on-premises and cloud environments.

· Ability to adapt to rapidly changing technology, processes, business models and user behaviors and apply them to business needs.

· Strong understanding of compute, storage, networking, virtualization, operating systems, database hosting dependencies, high availability, disaster recovery, infrastructure security, and applicable IT control requirements, including PCI requirements where relevant.

· Proficiency in requirements discovery, nonfunctional requirements analysis, infrastructure design, solution alternatives assessment, technology selection, and evaluation of performance, resilience, security, and cost trade-offs.

· Strong Program Management and Project Management Skills.

· Ability to document infrastructure designs, standards, operational requirements, and procedures in clear language appropriate for technical and nontechnical audiences.

· Good English and Spanish written and verbal communication skills.

· Must be able to work a flexible schedule as deem necessary by the business.

Disclaimer: The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, skills required of personnel so classified. The reporting relationship may not reflect the most recent changes to the corporate reporting structure.

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