Lead Architect
Job Description
The Lead Architect - Network & Infrastructure owns the technical vision, architecture, design authority and delivery transformation of all enterprise networks and infrastructure platforms. The role leads the evolution toward Infrastructure & Network as Code, enabling full automation of the infrastructure & network delivery lifecycle, while ensuring retail-grade security, resilience, reliability and performance at scale.
What you'll need to succeed
- 8-12+ years in senior infrastructure and network architecture roles covering large-scale distributed networks and platforms.
- Experience operating, standardizing and transforming 700+ distributed sites, ideally in retail, logistics or large multi-site environments.
- Expert knowledge of Cisco enterprise networking (WAN/LAN/WLAN/SD-WAN, API, CLI automation, segmentation and security architecture).
- Strong architecture knowledge of multi-cloud environments (AWS, MS Azure, OCI, GCP) and hybrid connectivity patterns.
- Deep experience with Microsoft enterprise technologies (identity, endpoints, servers, collaboration, security and corporate network stack).
- Proven experience in Infrastructure & Network as Code (Terraform, Ansible, GitOps, APIs, intent-based and declarative network models).
- Proven experience designing CI/CD pipelines and automation-first infrastructure transformation.
- Strong grounding in security, resilience, reliability and performance engineering for mission-critical distributed retail environments.
Nice to have
- Cloud networking and hybrid interconnect specialization.
- ITSM integration automation (ServiceNow, BMC, Jira Service Management or equivalent).
- Network validation automation (pyATS, Cisco Test Automation, or equivalent).
Leadership & behaviors
- Retail & uptime-first mindset, designing for 24/7 availability at scale.
- Automation advocate: standardize, test, deploy, observe and automate everything.
- Security-first thinker, vulnerability-aware & risk-native architecture owner.
- Resilience obsessed: redundancy across multiple architecture axes is embedded and automated.
- Outcome owner: uptime, reliability, compliance, incidents reduction and delivery automation at massive scale.
Impact & success measures
- Scaling and accelerating Infrastructure & Network as Code adoption across 700+ stores and distributed business units.
- Improving security posture by reducing vulnerabilities, inconsistencies and out-of-support exposure.
- Standardizing and securing multi-cloud and datacentre connectivity backbone for retail-grade performance and reliability.
- Delivering measurable improvements in uptime, network reliability, performance and infrastructure automation success rates.
- Automating the full delivery lifecycle including provisioning, configuration, testing, CMDB reconciliation and observability as code.
Responsibilities Duties:
- Define, maintain and govern enterprise network and infrastructure architecture frameworks, standards and regional blueprints across stores, offices, warehouses, datacentres, colocation, and edge.
- Build high-availability, secure and high-performance architectural solutions across WAN, LAN, WLAN, SD-WAN, network segmentation, cloud connectivity and hybrid infrastructure models.
- Act as the technical design authority and end-to-end architecture owner for network and infrastructure projects.
- Lead Infrastructure & Network as Code transformation across provisioning, configuration, validation, ITSM governance, CMDB state reconciliation and secure CI/CD pipelines.
- Embed security-by-design principles including network segmentation, zero-trust access models, encryption, firewalls, vulnerability reduction, secrets management and RBAC guardrails.
- Design for resilience, disaster recovery and business continuity through multi-axis redundancy and automated validation testing.
- Provide strategic mentorship and guidance to infrastructure and network engineering teams across the region.
- Partner closely with Retail Operations, Logistics, Cyber Security, Cloud Platform Engineering, ITSM teams, vendors and regional telecom providers to align architecture decisions with business outcomes.
- Define and own architecture KPIs including uptime, reliability, performance improvements, automation consistency and security vulnerability reduction.