Solution Architect – Defence

About the role

The Solutions Architect will play a strategic and hands‑on role designing, developing and governing enterprise infrastructure solutions for a highly regulated defence environment. You will work across secure on‑premises, hybrid and private cloud platforms, focusing on Microsoft‑based ecosystems together with virtualisation, networking and storage technologies.

Key responsibilities

• Produce high‑level and low‑level infrastructure designs (HLDs and LLDs) aligned with business and technical requirements.
• Define and maintain enterprise infrastructure standards, reference architectures and design principles covering compute, storage, networking, virtualisation and hybrid integration.
• Lead technical discovery activities, assess existing environments, identify technical debt and recommend modernisation opportunities.
• Translate business requirements into scalable, resilient designs in collaboration with project managers and technical teams.
• Provide architectural governance throughout the project lifecycle, ensuring compliance with standards and technical direction.
• Evaluate infrastructure technologies and recommend solutions balancing performance, resilience, cost and operational impact.
• Define migration strategies, including workload placement, phased transitions, rollback planning and service continuity.
• Maintain architecture documentation such as HLDs, LLDs, reference architectures and standards.
• Identify and manage technical risks, assumptions, constraints and dependencies, proposing mitigation measures.
• Offer technical leadership and design assurance during implementation to keep solutions aligned with approved architecture.

Required profile

• Minimum 8 + years of experience in IT infrastructure, solution architecture or enterprise engineering within complex environments.
• Strong technical knowledge of Microsoft‑based infrastructure and extensive hands‑on experience designing and delivering enterprise solutions.
• Proven ability to work in highly regulated sectors, particularly defence, and to manage large‑scale infrastructure projects.

Required skills

• Microsoft infrastructure
• Virtualisation technologies
• Networking
• Storage platforms
• Hybrid cloud integration
• Private cloud environments
• On‑premises infrastructure design