Cloud Architect/Lead
The role of the Cloud & Hosting Infrastructure Lead is the subject matter expert and leader of the hybrid hosting infrastructure currently both on-premises and in public cloud tenants – specifically Azure and AWS.
The Cloud & Hosting Infrastructure Lead is responsible for the design and implementation of all infrastructure environments including storage, servers, virtualization, infra-automation systems and all associated hardware and software solutions, with an emphasis stability, integrity and performance. The role ensures that infrastructure implementations follow project management and service delivery best practices. This role requires strategic vision, conceptual design, detailed design, and hands-on implementation.
The Cloud & Hosting Infrastructure Lead oversees a broad team of hosting engineers, system administrators, and storage professionals who leverage good infrastructure engineering practices to ensure consistency and stable operations.
Additionally, the Cloud & Hosting Infrastructure Lead will define strategies and plans to enable cloud-first vision, migration of existing on-premises hosts and develop infra-automation functionalities. The Cloud & Hosting Infrastructure Lead will work with all project teams within the business as well as technology teams to ensure the hosting needs of their changes and new applications are met. They will also work closely with the infrastructure operations teams to support trouble-shooting, root-cause analysis, and problem remediation, as well as to deploy new solutions and upgrades.
This person must also be comfortable operating as an individual contributor and using influence and expertise to aid the transformation of an organization.
BPX Energy’s engineering functions often leverage third party contractors to execute work, and this role will require the ability to manage/lead in this type of environment.
Key accountabilities
- Drive excellent, consistent customer service via operations.
- Ensure the proper management, maintenance and provisioning of all environments.
- Lead and develop our infrastructure team to greater heights of effectiveness, customer service and accomplishment.
- Ensure infrastructure team & our hosting is adhering to company Information Security standards and best practices
- Responsible for the proper monitoring and alerting of all environments.
- Responsible for internal infrastructure projects which may require cross departmental coordination to achieve goals.
- Provide input into infrastructure lifecycle, improvement and standardization strategies.
- Provide leadership and direction to help Enterprise Architect and reference architectures to leverage best practice and cutting-edge cloud services.
- Drive the objectives associated with Root Cause Analysis to provide best class Problem Management support and enhance infrastructure to remediate known issues.
- Monitor monthly utilization reports to provide visibility to the team’s performance and resource availability and cost management.
- Develops pragmatic roadmaps to deliver the policy in conjunction with key stakeholders.
- Create strong credible relationships through liaison with business stakeholders and technical experts.
- Provide technical expertise and consulting to various delivery teams responsible for refactoring and moving applications into the Cloud
- Provide operational expertise and design oversight for any required infra-automated tooling necessary to fully leverage the capabilities of cloud platforms (e.g. environment provisioning, automated build and deployment, monitoring, metering, management and administration, etc.)
- Provide design consulting necessary to inform refactoring efforts to enable legacy applications to leverage the full capabilities of cloud platforms
- Provide thought leadership and help drive standardization and adoption of best practices in relation to how the teams use the various BPX Energy cloud offerings
- Defines, documents and implements the cloud solution architecture as needed
- Proactively seeks to refactor and improve cloud hosted solutions to leverage improved solutions from public cloud vendors
- Identifies any gaps in any existing solutions, work with the IT&S LT to identify and roadmap solutions.
- Updates job knowledge by tracking and understanding emerging cloud practices and standards; participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining personal networks; participating in professional organizations.
- Enhances department and organization reputation by accepting ownership for accomplishing new and different requests; exploring opportunities to add value to job accomplishments.
- Ability to inspire change across the business and create an understanding around cloud usage
Leadership
- Generates enthusiasm among team members.
- Proactively seeks opportunities to serve in leadership roles.
- Challenges others to develop as leaders while serving as a role model.
- Manages the process of innovative change.
- Collaborates with and influences others not in direct line
Teamwork
- Facilitates effective team interaction.
- Acknowledges and appreciates each team member's contributions.
- Works effectively with distributed team members
Essential Education
- Minimum requirement of four-year college degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Management Information Systems or related discipline
Essential experience and job requirements
- 10+ years of relevant work experience in IT with minimum of 6-8 years in infrastructure hosting and cloud
- Experience working in a hybrid environment with multiple datacenters, multiple public cloud and SaaS providers.
- Strong understanding of cloud architecture best practices, standards and services
- Experience with the Azure and AWS cloud platforms
- Experience with virtualization solutions for servers and desktop/workstation provisioning either on-premises or cloud platforms, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
- Cloud Services/IaaS engineering experience is required.
- Experience with Active Directory integration in a hybrid on-premise / Azure / AWS environment
- Experience with Virtual Private Clouds, Cloud Exchanges, and other concepts that enable hybrid on-premise and cloud environments to function.
- Knowledge of and experience implementing hosting to support complex applications e.g. service oriented architectures or distributed graphics processing engines.
- Ability to work with multiple external teams and accomplish shared goals through the building consensus
- Experience with automated infrastructure build and deploy technologies
- Strong communication (written/verbal) and collaboration skills
- Consulting, negotiation and relationship skills
- Problem solving skills
- Experience working in geographically dispersed organizations and decentralized hosting arrangements.
- Enthusiastic, high-energy individual, self-motivated, people-oriented and self-directed
- Must be an intelligent, articulate and persuasive leader who can serve as an effective member of the IT team, who can communicate complex concepts to technical and non-technical colleague.
- Must be able to maintain focus on achieving results, whilst being patient and pragmatic
Desirable criteria & qualifications
- In-depth technical experience implementation complex solutions and environments on the AWS Cloud.
- In-depth technical experience with cloud security, especially in a hybrid infrastructure environment.
- Strong understanding of networking principles and technologies, within cloud, data center, and WAN environments.
- Supervision, management or leadership position experience desirable.
- Vendor management experience
- Desire to continually learn outside of a classroom environment, and successfully apply learnings
- Demonstrated willingness to both teach others and learn new techniques
Travel required
Yes – up to 25%
Employment Type
Full-time: Denver, CO based (Houston, TX possible)