Cloud & Virtualization Architect

Role Overview As the Cloud Virtualization Architect, you will own the design and architecture of the enterprise virtualization platform (primarily Hyper-V) and its hybrid-cloud integration across a large-scale environment. This is a senior architecture and engineering role - not an operations or day-to-day administration role. You will define how virtualization clusters are designed, sized, automated, and self-healed, setting the standards and reference architectures that operations teams execute against. You will be the technical authority for cluster performance, capacity/right-sizing, and infrastructure automation, solving the hardest platform-level problems and driving the strategy rather than handling ticket queues. Key Responsibilities - Serve as the design authority for the enterprise virtualization platform, primarily Hyper-V (Failover Clustering, storage, and networking design) - Architect virtualization clusters for performance, availability, and scale - including host standards, HA/failover design, and cluster topology - Own capacity planning and right-sizing across the fleet: node sizing, RAM/CPU/storage ratios, HA reservation models, and consolidation ratios grounded in real utilization data - Design and drive infrastructure automation and orchestration using Ansible and Terraform - provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle as code - Architect self-healing infrastructure: automated detection and remediation of host, cluster, and VM health issues to reduce manual intervention - Define reference architectures, design standards, and build/validate/release pipelines for virtualization hosts and templates - Architect hybrid-cloud and cloud integration (Azure preferred), including landing zone design, connectivity, and workload placement between on-prem and cloud - Establish performance baselines and observability standards for cluster health, capacity, and utilization; use data to guide design decisions - Partner with compute, storage, network, and security teams to align virtualization design with hardening, compliance, and DR/BC requirements - Provide senior-level architecture guidance and root-cause analysis for platform-wide virtualization and performance issues; mentor engineers and set technical direction Qualifications

Required Skills Experience - Deep expertise architecting enterprise virtualization at scale, with primary strength in Hyper-V and Failover Clustering (VMware vSphere experience a plus) - Proven experience with cluster performance engineering, capacity planning, and rightsizing across large fleets (thousands of VMs / hundreds of hosts) - Strong automation and orchestration background: Terraform and Ansible for infrastructure-as-code and configuration management - Experience designing self-healing / auto-remediation systems for infrastructure health and reliability - Advanced PowerShell scripting for automation, reporting, and remediation - Solid understanding of the underlying stack: compute, storage (SAN/NAS/S2D/vSAN), and networking as they relate to virtualization performance - Hybrid-cloud and public cloud architecture experience (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP relevant) - Strong grasp of HA/DR design, live migration, and workload mobility - Ability to operate as an architect: produce reference architectures and design documentation, set standards, and guide execution teams General Skills Competencies - Proactive self-starter who manages time and priorities independently - Strong ability to translate business, performance, and capacity needs into comprehensive technical designs while building credibility across teams - Clear written and verbal communication; able to deliver formal architecture presentations to technical teams and leadership - Data-driven decision-maker who grounds design choices in utilization and performance metrics - Mentors engineers, drives platform and process improvements, and keeps current with the virtualization and cloud landscape
Experience Required - 10+ years in infrastructure engineering with a significant portion in a virtualization architecture or technical lead capacity on large-scale environments - Demonstrated ownership of cluster design, capacity/right-sizing, and infrastructure automation (Ansible/Terraform) at scale