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.