Infrastructure Architect

Job description

**Join a Challenger**At EQ, we're remaking banking so every Canadian gets ahead, every day. Serving nearly 4 million Canadians from coast to coast, we offer a wide variety of financial services from banking and lending, to trust and credit union solutions. We've been at this since 1970, challenging the conventions of traditional banking with smarter, faster, and more connected financial experiences. **What's kept us moving?** The people behind it all: challengers who ask better questions, push back on old assumptions, and look for a better way forward. If you're driven to help reshape how banking works for Canadians and the businesses that power our economy, this could be your next big opportunity. We can’t wait to get to know you! ***The Work*** The **Infrastructure Architect** is a senior technical leader responsible for defining and evolving the Banks cloud‑centric infrastructure platforms. This role focuses on the design and governance of scalable, secure, and resilient infrastructure across public cloud, hybrid, and supporting on‑prem environments. The Infrastructure Architect ensures cloud and infrastructure solutions are aligned with business objectives, IT strategy, and operational requirements. Serving as the architectural authority for infrastructure, the role translates business, application, and operational needs into cloud‑forward designs that emphasize automation, elasticity, security, and cost optimization. The Infrastructure Architect establishes cloud architecture standards, reference designs, and patterns that enable consistent adoption of cloud services while supporting reliability, performance, and compliance requirements. Working closely with the **Director of Infrastructure Architecture**, **VP of Infrastructure & Operations (I&O)**, and technology leadership, the Infrastructure Architect plays a key role in shaping cloud strategy and major technology investments. This includes evaluating cloud services and platforms, defining target‑state cloud and hybrid architectures, developing roadmaps for cloud adoption and modernization, and producing clear, actionable architecture documentation and recommendations. In addition, the Infrastructure Architect acts as a trusted advisor to infrastructure, platform, and application teams, providing guidance on cloud best practices, platform selection, and architectural trade‑offs. Through collaboration and influence, the role helps drive consistent, efficient, and sustainable cloud and infrastructure solutions across the organization. ### The Core Responsibilities! **General Responsibilities** - **Cloud & Technology Evaluation:** Evaluate emerging cloud services, infrastructure platforms, and architectural approaches to ensure alignment with current and future business needs. - **Architectural & Financial Analysis:** Perform technical, architectural, and cost analyses to support infrastructure planning, cloud design, and investment decisions. - **Cloud Design Principles:** Apply cloud and infrastructure design principles that balance cost optimization, availability, scalability, supportability, and security. - **Collaborative Solution Design:** Partner with the **Director of Infrastructure Architecture** and key stakeholders to assess requirements and design cloud‑centric infrastructure solutions. - **Security & Regulatory Compliance:** Ensure cloud and infrastructure architectures comply with security, risk, and regulatory requirements, including **OSFI guidelines**. - **Architecture Assessment & Optimization:** Regularly assess infrastructure and cloud architectures to identify gaps, inefficiencies, technical debt, and opportunities for improvement. - **Technology Research & Proof of Concept:** Research, evaluate, and where appropriate, pilot new cloud platforms, services, tools, and vendors. - **Vendor & Partner Engagement:** Build and maintain strong relationships with cloud and infrastructure vendors to leverage external expertise and emerging capabilities. - **Infrastructure Strategy Contribution:** Contribute to the development and evolution of the organization’s infrastructure and cloud strategy, roadmaps, and future‑state direction. - Architect and govern enterprise AI platform foundations, including secure cloud landing zones, networking, identity, role‑based access control, and operational guardrails for AI workloads. Ensure AI platforms are designed to meet non‑functional requirements related to security, scalability, resiliency, observability, cost management, and regulatory compliance. **Standards & Governance** - **Cloud & Infrastructure Standards:** Define, maintain, and enforce cloud and infrastructure standards, architectural principles, and best practices. - **Reference Architectures & Patterns:** Establish and promote reusable cloud architecture patterns, reference designs, and platform standards. - **Policies & Guardrails:** Define and enforce policies for cloud and infrastructure design, deployment, security, and lifecycle management. - **Risk & Resilience:** Identify architectural risks and develop mitigation strategies in collaboration with security, operations, and delivery teams. - Define and enforce infrastructure standards and non‑functional requirements for API platforms, including API management gateways, network placement, identity integration, security controls, resiliency patterns, monitoring, and lifecycle management. **Leadership, Development, and Continuous Improvement** - **Technical Leadership:** Collaborate with the **Associate Director of Shared Services** to establish and evolve technical standards for cloud and infrastructure platforms. - **Operational Alignment:** Ensure architecture decisions support operational excellence and align with internal and external technical standards. - **Networking & Connectivity Insight:** Work closely with IT colleagues to understand and influence current and future networking, connectivity, and cloud integration capabilities. - **Organizational Contributions:** Participate in departmental initiatives, programs, and cross‑functional efforts as required. - **Architecture Community Leadership:** Lead the **Infrastructure Architect Forum**, facilitating discussions on cloud architecture, standards, solution design, and tactical challenges. - **Trusted Advisor & Mentor:** Act as a trusted advisor and mentor to infrastructure, platform, and application teams, providing architectural guidance throughout project and product lifecycles. ### Let's Talk About You! **Education and Experience:** - Educational Background: Preferably a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering. - Professional Experience: At least ten years in IT, with a minimum of five years in senior IT technical role. - Solution Design and Implementation: Proven expertise in designing and implementing enterprise-grade solutions with comprehensive documentation and strategic plans. **Technical Proficiencies:** - **Cloud Platforms & Services:** Strong experience designing and operating cloud infrastructure, with a focus on **Azure** and supporting hybrid environments. - **Application & Platform Infrastructure:** Solid understanding of application platforms and middleware (e.g., application servers, web servers, platform services), with the ability to design scalable and resilient runtime environments. - **Virtualization & Cloud Infrastructure:** Experience with virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies (e.g., IaC, IaaS, PaaS), including capacity planning and platform design. - **Containers & Orchestration:** Practical experience designing and supporting containerized platforms using **Docker** and **Kubernetes**, including platform architecture and operational considerations. - **Operating Systems:** Deep understanding of **Linux/UNIX** operating systems (e.g., Red Hat, AIX), including performance, security, and lifecycle management. - **DevOps & Automation:** Experience supporting or enabling **DevOps practices**, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and infrastructure‑as‑code approaches. - **Data Platforms (Architectural Level):** Working knowledge of relational database technologies and data platforms, including OLTP and data warehousing architectures, from an infrastructure and scalability perspective. - **Networking & Connectivity:** Strong understanding of enterprise and cloud networking concepts, including routing, segmentation, load balancing, and secure connectivity. - **Security Architecture:** Solid understanding of security principles, frameworks, and controls as they apply to cloud and infrastructure design. - **AI Platform Infrastructure**: Experience designing and governing cloud‑based AI platform infrastructure (e.g., Azure AI platforms), including landing zone integration, network isolation, identity and RBAC, platform security controls, model governance enablement, and operational monitoring. - **API Management Platforms:** Experience designing and governing API management infrastructure (e.g., Azure API Management) with a focus on security, identity integration, network architecture, resiliency, scalability, observability, and operational supportability.