Infrastructure Solution Architect

Position Title: Infrastructure Solution Architect
Position Type: Regular - Full-Time
Position Location: New Delhi
Requisition ID: 32004
JOB PURPOSE:
As a Cloud Infrastructure Solution Architect, you'll drive the success of our IT Architecture program through your design expertise and consultative approach. You'll collaborate with stakeholders to understand their technical requirements, designing and documenting tailored solutions. Your blend of architecture and operations experience will enable you to accurately size work efforts and determine the necessary skills and resources for projects. Strong communication, time management, and process skills are essential for success in this role. You should have deep experience in defining Infrastructure solutions: Design, Architecture and Solution Building blocks.
Role Overview:
The cloud infrastructure architect role helps teams (such as product teams, platform teams and application teams) successfully adopt cloud infrastructure and platform services. It is heavily involved in design and implementation activities that result in new or improved cloud-related capabilities, and it brings skills and expertise to such areas as cloud technical architecture (for a workload's use of infrastructure as a service [IaaS] and platform as a service [PaaS] components); automating cloud management tasks, provisioning and configuration management; and other aspects involved in preparing and optimizing cloud solutions.
Successful outcomes are likely to embrace infrastructure-as-code (IaC), DevOps and Agile ways of working and associated automation approaches, all underpinned by the cloud infrastructure engineer's solid understanding of networking and security in the cloud. The nature of the work involved means that the cloud infrastructure engineer will directly engage with customer teams, but will also work on cloud infrastructure platform capabilities that span multiple teams.
The cloud infrastructure architect collaborates closely with other architects, product/platform teams, software developers, Cloud Engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), security, and network specialists, as well as other roles, particularly those in the infrastructure and operations. Being an approachable team-player is therefore crucial for success, and willingness to lead initiatives is important too.
The cloud infrastructure engineer also supports colleagues with complex (escalated) operational concerns in areas such as deployment activities, event management, incident and problem management, availability, capacity and service-level management, as well as service continuity.
The cloud infrastructure architect is expected to demonstrate strong attention to detail and a customer-centric mindset. Inquisitiveness, determination, creativity, communicative and collaboration skills are important qualities too.
Key Responsibilities:

• Provide expert knowledge on cloud infrastructure and platforms solutions architecture, to ensure our organization achieves its goals for cloud adoption. This involves translating cloud strategy and architecture into efficient, resilient, and secure technical implementations.
• Define cloud infrastructure landing zones, regional subscriptions, Availability Zone, to ensure HA, resiliency and reliability of Infrastructure and applciations
• Offer cloud-engineering thought leadership in areas to define specific cloud use cases, cloud service providers, and/or strategic tools and technologies
• Support cloud strategy working on new cloud solutions including analysing requirements, supporting technical architecture activities, prototyping, design and development of infrastructure artifacts, testing, implementation, and the preparation for ongoing support.
• Work on cloud migration projects, including analyzing requirements and backlogs, identifying migration techniques, developing migration artifacts, executing processes, and ensuring preparations for ongoing support.
• Design, build, deliver, maintain and improve infrastructure solutions. This includes automation strategies such as IaC, configuration-as-code, policy-as-code, release orchestration and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and collaborative ways of working (e.g., DevOps). Participate in change and release management processes, carrying out complex provisioning and configuration tasks manually, where needed.
• Research and prototype new tools and technologies to enhance cloud platform capabilities. Proactively identify innovative ways to reduce toil, and teach, coach or mentor others to improve cloud outcomes using automation.
• Improve reliability, scalability and efficiency by working with product engineers and site reliability engineers to ensure well-architected and thoughtfully operationalized cloud infrastructures. This includes assisting with nonfunctional requirements, such as data protection, high availability, disaster recovery, monitoring requirements and efficiency considerations in different environments.
• Provide subject matter expertise for all approved IaaS and PaaS services, respond promptly to escalated incidents and requests, and build reusable artifacts ready for deployment to cloud environments.
• Exert influence that lifts cloud engineering competency by participating in (and, where applicable, leading) organizational learning practices, such as communities of practice, dojos, hackathons and centers of excellence (COEs). Actively participate in mentoring. Practice continuous improvement and knowledge sharing (e.g., providing KB articles, training and white papers).
• Participate in planning and optimization activities, including capacity, reliability, cost management and performance engineering.
• Establish FinOps Practices - Cloud Cost management, Scale up/down, Environment creation/deletion based on consumption
• Work closely with security specialists to design, implement and test security controls, and ensure engineering activities align to security configuration guidance.
• Establish logging, monitoring and observability solutions, including identification of requirements, design, implementation and operationalization.
• Optimize infrastructure integration in all scenarios - single cloud, multicloud and hybrid.
• Convey the pros and cons of cloud services and other cloud engineering topics to others at differing levels of cloud maturity and experience, and in different roles (e.g., developers and business technologists). Be forthcoming and open when the cloud is not the best solution.
• Work closely with third-party suppliers, both as an individual contributor and as a project lead, when required. Engage with vendor technical support as the customer lead role when appropriate.
• Participate/Lead problem management activities, including post-mortem incident analysis, providing technical insight, documented findings, outcomes and recommendations as part of a root cause analysis.
• Support resilience activities - e.g., disaster recovery (DR) testing, performance testing and tabletop planning exercises.
• The role holder is also expected to:
• Ensure that activities are tracked and auditable by leveraging service enablement systems, logging activity in the relevant systems of record, and following change and release processes.
• Collaborate with peers from other teams, such as security, compliance, enterprise architecture, service governance, and IT finance to implement technical controls to support governance, as necessary. Work in accordance with the organization's published standards and ensure that services are delivered in compliance with policy.
• Promptly respond to requests for engineering assistance from technical customers as needed. Provide engineering support, present ideas and create best-practice guidance materials. Strive to meet service-level expectations.
• Foster ongoing, closer and repeatable engagement with customers to achieve better, scalable outcomes.
• Take ownership of personal development, working with line management to identify development opportunities.
• Work with limited guidance, independently and/or as part of a team on complex problems, potentially requiring close collaboration with remotely based employees and third-party providers.
• Follow standard operating procedures, propose improvements and develop new standard operating procedures to further industrialize our approach. Advocate for simplification and workflow optimization, and follow documentation standards.

Skills and Experience:
Skills and Experience in the following activities/working styles is essential:

• Collaboration with developers (and other roles, such as SREs and DevSecOps Engineers) to plan, design, implement, operationalize and problem solve workloads that leverage cloud infrastructure and platform services.
• Working in an infrastructure or application support team.
• Cloud migration project experience. [Data center to Cloud IAAS, Cloud Native, Hybrid Cloud]
• Securing cloud platforms and cloud workloads in collaboration with security teams.
• Familiarity or experience with DevOps/DevSecOps.
• Agile practices (such as Scrum/Sprints, Customer Journey Mapping, Kanban).
• Proposing new standards, addressing peer feedback and advocating for improvement.
• Understanding of software engineering principles (source control, versioning, code reviews, etc.)
• Working in an environment that complies with Health and, Manufacturing
• Event-based architectures and associated infrastructure patterns
• Experience working with specific technical teams: [R&D teams, Data and analytics teams, etc.]
• Experience where immutable infrastructure approaches have been used
• Implementing highly available systems, using multi-AZ and multi region approaches

Skills and experience in the following technology areas:

• Experience with Azure, GCP, AWS, SAP cloud provider services (Azure and SAP preferred)
• Experience with these cloud provider services is preferred: Infra, Data, App, API and Integration Services
• DevOps-tooling such as CI/CD (e.g., Jenkins, Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps/ADO, TeamCity, GitHub, GitLab)
• Infrastructure-as-code approaches, role-specific automation tools and associated programming languages (e.g., Ansible, ARM, Chef, Cloud Formation, Pulumi, Puppet, Terraform, Salt, AWS CDK, Azure SDK)
• Orchestration Tools (e.g., Morpheus Data, env0, Cloudify, Pliant, Quali, RackN, VRA, Crossplane, ArgoCD)
• Knowledge of software development frameworks/Languages; [e.g., Spring, Java, GOlang, PHP, Python]
• Container management (e.g., Docker, Rancher, Kubernetes, AKS, EKS, GKE, RHOS, VMware Tanzu)
• Virtualization platforms (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V)
• Operating systems (e.g., Windows and Linux including scripting experience)
• Database technologies and caching (e.g., Postgres, MSSQL, NoSQL, Redis, CDN)
• Identity and access management (e.g., Active Directory/Azure AD, Group Policy, SSO, cloud RBAC and hierarchy and federation)
• Monitoring tools (e.g., AWS CloudWatch, Elastic Stack (Elastic Search/Logstash/Kibana), Datadog, LogicMonitor, Splunk)
• Cloud networking (e.g., Subnetting, Route Tables, Security Groups, VPC, VPC Peering, NACLS, VPN, Transit Gateways, optimizing for egress costs)
• Cloud security (e.g., key management services, encryption, other core security services/controls the organization uses)
• Landing Zone Automation solutions (e.g., AWS Control tower)
• Policy guardrails (e.g., policy-as-code approaches, cloud provider native policy tools, Hashicorp Sentinel, Open Policy Agent)
• Scalable architectures, including APIs, microservices and PaaS.
• Analyzing cloud spending and optimizing resources (e.g., Apptio Cloudability, Flexera One, IBM Turbonomic, Netapp Spot, VMware CloudHealth)
• Implementing resilience (e.g., multi-AZ, multi-region, backup and recovery tools)
• Cloud provider frameworks (e.g., Well-Architected)
• Working with architecture tools and associated artifacts
• General skills, behaviors, competencies and experience required includes:
• Strong communication skills (both written and verbal), including the ability to adapt style to a nontechnical audience
• Ability to stay calm and focused under pressure
• Collaborative working
• Proactive and detail-oriented, strong analytical skills, and the ability to leverage a data-driven approach
• Willing to share expertise and best practices, including mentoring and coaching others
• Continuous learning mindset, keen to learn and explore new areas - not afraid of starting from a novice level
• Ability to present solutions, defend criticism of ideas, and provide constructive peer reviews
• Ability to build consensus, make decisions based on many variables and gain support for initiatives
• Business acumen, preferably industry and domain-specific knowledge relevant to the enterprise and its business units
• Deep understanding of current and emerging I&O, and, in particular, cloud, technologies and practices
• Achieve compliance requirements by applying technical capabilities, processes and procedures as required

Job Requirements
Education and Qualifications
Essential:

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, information systems, a related field, or equivalent work experience
• Ten or more years of related experience in similar roles
• Must have worked on implementing cloud at enterprise scale

Desirable:

• Cloud provider/Hyperscalers certifications preferred.
• Must Have Skills and Experience
• Strong problem solving and analytical skills.
• Strong interpersonal and written and verbal communication skills.
• Highly adaptable to changing circumstances. Interest in continuously learning new skills and technologies.
• Experience with programming and scripting languages (e.g. Java, C#, C++, Python, Bash, PowerShell).
• Experience with incident and response management.
• Experience with Agile and DevOps development methodologies.
• Experience with container technologies and supporting tools (e.g. Docker Swarm, Podman, Kubernetes, Mesos).
• Experience with working in cloud ecosystems (Microsoft Azure AWS, Google Cloud Platform,).
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g. Splunk, Cloudwatch, AppDynamics, NewRelic, ELK, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience with configuration management systems (e.g. Puppet, Ansible, Chef, Salt, Terraform).
• Experience working with continuous integration/continuous deployment tools (e.g. Git, Teamcity, Jenkin, Artifactory).
• Experience in GitOps based automation is Plus

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent years of experience).
• 5+ years of relevant work experience. SRE experience preferred.
• Background in Manufacturing, Platform/Tech compnies is preferred.
• Must have Public Cloud provider certifications (Azure, GCP or AWS)
• Having CNCF certification is plus
• Started sharing status update to Function Owner and CC to Hiring Manager twice a week
• Approaching Hiring Manager for the status keeping in CC, McCain's HR Head and TA Head
• Started interacting with Hiring Managers on MS Teams every alternate days

McCain Foods is an equal opportunity employer. We see value in ensuring we have a diverse, antiracist, inclusive, merit-based, and equitable workplace. As a global family-owned company we are proud to reflect the diverse communities around the world in which we live and work. We recognize that diversity drives our creativity, resilience, and success and makes our business stronger.
McCain is an accessible employer. If you require an accommodation throughout the recruitment process (including alternate formats of materials or accessible meeting rooms), please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.
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Job Family: Information Technology
Division: Global Digital Technology
Department: Infrastructure Architecture
Location(s): IN - India : Haryana : Gurgaon
Company: McCain Foods(India) P Ltd