Job Description

A programme is replacing a legacy classified network with a modern operational network running on a private cloud, across a command structure of twenty-plus locations and somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand users. Fourteen work packages, four pillar teams, around thirty people talking to each other daily. This post sits in system integration and is the architect who keeps the design coherent across all of it.

There are two tracks, and they matter equally. The first is architecture and governance: validating and steering the solution architecture for the air-gapped cloud, built on VMware Cloud Foundation 9, NSX-T, Cisco ACI, Palo Alto, HP and Rubrik. The second is automation — validating and coordinating infrastructure delivered as code, and getting the organisation to adopt that as its normal way of working rather than a side project.

What you would be doing

• Review and validate the design documents for the private cloud, and name the gaps, risks and non-conformances against best practice and the governing architecture.
• Give design guidance to the infrastructure and platform teams throughout implementation.
• Define and maintain architecture decision records, with traceability from requirement to design.
• Define and specify the interface control documents between the cloud and every producer and consumer service, and keep an interface register under change control.
• Coordinate design and implementation between the cyber security and infrastructure teams — privileged access management with CyberArk, certificate lifecycle, and security monitoring integration.
• Chair joint design sessions and resolve the cross-team dependencies that stall work.
• Validate and guide infrastructure automation using Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins and the platform's own automation.
• Define the automation and infrastructure-as-code target operating model, and document the transition to it.
• Help the cloud operating teams build automation skills.

What you would bring

• Solution architecture experience on large enterprise private cloud, ideally air-gapped or otherwise heavily constrained.
• Real depth in VMware Cloud Foundation, NSX-T and Cisco ACI, and enough breadth to review a design you did not write.
• Practical infrastructure-as-code and automation experience — Ansible, Terraform, pipelines — and the judgement to know what should not be automated yet.
• Experience writing architecture decision records and interface control documents that survive review.
• The authority to chair a design session with several teams in the room, and the patience to close the dependency afterwards.

Delivery runs in monthly sprints with planning, weekly progress meetings and a review at the end of each month. The work is done off site with at least two full days a week on site in The Hague. A single person delivers this scope.