Infrastructure Architect

Experience

• 10+ years of professional experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or cloud architecture with at least 3 of those years operating at a principal, staff, or architect level where you made design decisions with platform-wide consequences, not just implemented them.
• Demonstrable experience designing and owning a Kubernetes-based platform at production scale — not administering a cluster that someone else designed. You have made the node pool, networking, and RBAC decisions, written the Terraform modules from scratch, and been accountable for the platform's availability targets.
• Production multi-cloud experience at the architecture level: you have provisioned and operated workloads on at least two cloud providers and you understand where the abstractions hold and where they break. Cloud-agnostic IaC is not a design principle to you — it is something you have actually delivered.
• End-to-end CI/CD and GitOps ownership: you have designed a delivery platform that engineers other than yourself use daily — including the security gates, approval workflows, and rollback procedures — and you have improved it based on post-incident analysis.
• Secrets management architecture experience: you have designed and operated HashiCorp Vault (or an equivalent) in production, including auth method configuration, secret engine design, lease TTL governance, and rotation policy — not just called the API.
• Distributed systems debugging at depth: you have diagnosed production failures in systems involving a message broker, a distributed cache, and a graph or relational database simultaneously — and you have used traces, metrics, and logs together to find root causes that none of them revealed independently.
• People leadership: you have technically led at least two engineers in a formal or informal capacity — setting direction, reviewing design decisions, unblocking them in incidents, and developing their skills — not just mentored peers informally.
• Security architecture experience: you have owned a DevSecOps pipeline from design to enforcement — including writing or commissioning SAST rules, operating container scanning in CI, and participating in threat modelling sessions that produced actionable outputs for engineering teams.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline — OR — equivalent practical experience demonstrable through portfolio, professional references, and interview performance.
• Relevant certifications that demonstrate structured depth — CKA, CKAD, CKS, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, AWS DevOps Engineer Professional, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, GCP Professional DevOps Engineer, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, CISSP, or equivalent — are a positive signal but are secondary to demonstrated production impact.