Solution Architect - Defence

Solutions Architect

Location: Bristol (North East/ with Parking)
Job Type: Full-time/4 days on site
Salary £67,056 to £72,107 Solutions Architect to play a strategic and hands-on role in the design, development, and governance of enterprise infrastructure solutions across secure on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments. This role is crucial within a highly regulated defence environment, focusing on Microsoft-based enterprise ecosystems alongside virtualisation, networking, and storage platforms. The successful candidate will define scalable, resilient, and supportable infrastructure architectures that meet both operational and business requirements.

Day-to-day of the role:

Produce high-level and low-level infrastructure designs (HLDs and LLDs) across various environments, ensuring alignment with business, operational, 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 to assess existing infrastructure environments, identify technical debt, dependencies, and opportunities for modernisation.
Translate business requirements into scalable and resilient infrastructure designs in collaboration with project managers, architects, and technical teams.
Provide architectural governance across the project lifecycle, ensuring solutions are reviewed and aligned to enterprise standards and technical direction.
Evaluate infrastructure technologies and architectural options, producing recommendations that balance performance, resilience, maintainability, cost, and operational impact.
Define infrastructure migration strategies, including workload placement, phased transition approaches, rollback planning, and service continuity considerations.
Produce and maintain architecture documentation, including HLDs, LLDs, reference architectures, and standards.
Identify, assess, and manage technical risks, assumptions, constraints, and dependencies throughout project delivery, ensuring appropriate mitigation strategies are defined.
Provide technical leadership and design assurance during implementation, ensuring delivered solutions remain aligned to the approved architecture.Required Skills & Qualifications:

Minimum 8+ years of experience in IT Infrastructure, with a strong focus on infrastructure design, solution architecture, or enterprise engineering roles in complex environments.
Strong technical knowledge of Microsoft-based infrastructure and extensive hands-on experience with enterprise virtualisation technologies.
Proven experience designing and delivering on-premises and hybrid infrastructure architectures, including integration with public cloud platforms.
Strong understanding of enterprise networking principles, including segmentation, routing, firewall integration, and hybrid connectivity.
Demonstrable experience producing and assuring HLDs and LLDs within infrastructure transformation or modernisation programmes.
Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate complex infrastructure designs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Awareness of Cyber Security tooling and configuration