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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for On-Premise Cloud Infrastructure Architect

💰 $ - $

InfrastructureCloudDevOpsArchitectureSecurity

🎯 Role Definition

The On-Premise Cloud Infrastructure Architect is a senior engineering and architecture role focused on designing, implementing, and operating scalable, secure and highly available private and hybrid cloud platforms within enterprise data centers. This role combines deep technical expertise across virtualization, containers, networking, storage and automation with strategic planning, vendor management, cost optimization, and cross-functional leadership. The architect will shape cloud-native and legacy modernization initiatives, enforce security and compliance controls, define infrastructure-as-code standards, and mentor engineering teams to deliver production-grade infrastructure for business-critical applications.

Key SEO keywords: on-premise cloud architect, private cloud architect, hybrid cloud architecture, VMware, OpenStack, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Terraform, Ansible, infrastructure-as-code, data center architecture, storage and network design, disaster recovery, platform engineering.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Systems Administrator with virtualization and scripting experience
  • Cloud Platform Engineer / Private Cloud Engineer
  • Senior Network/Storage Engineer with data center design exposure

Advancement To:

  • Principal Infrastructure Architect (Cloud & Data Center)
  • Director of Cloud Infrastructure or Head of Platform Engineering
  • VP of Infrastructure / Chief Infrastructure Officer (CIO/CTO track)

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Lead / Platform SRE
  • Platform Engineering Manager
  • Security Infrastructure Architect (Cloud Security, Zero Trust)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect and lead the design and delivery of enterprise-grade on-premise private cloud platforms (VMware vSphere, OpenStack, Red Hat Virtualization) and hybrid cloud extensions, producing high-fidelity architecture diagrams, solution blueprints, and capacity models.
  • Define and implement infrastructure-as-code practice and reusable modules (Terraform, Pulumi) to provision compute, network, and storage resources consistently across data centers and edge sites.
  • Design and operate container platforms on-premise such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, or Rancher; define cluster topology, multi-tenancy patterns, ingress/egress strategies, and production-grade upgrade processes.
  • Lead migration planning and execution for lift-and-shift, re-platforming, and cloud repatriation projects, coordinating cross-functional teams, runbooks, rollback plans, and cutover activities to minimize risk and downtime.
  • Create scalable and resilient storage architectures (SAN, NAS, NVMe, HCI) with tiering, replication and backup strategies to meet RTO/RPO objectives for critical applications.
  • Architect and implement network topology for private clouds including software-defined networking (NSX, Open vSwitch), VLANs, routing, firewalling, load balancing and secure multi-tenant segmentation.
  • Establish disaster recovery and business continuity designs: secondary data center replication, automated failover, backup retention policies, and regular DR testing.
  • Implement enterprise-level observability and monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, Splunk) to capture metrics, logs, traces and define alerting and escalation workflows.
  • Define platform security baselines and implement controls (host hardening, microsegmentation, network ACLs, encryption at-rest/in-transit), integrate with IAM and centralized authentication (LDAP, AD, SAML, OIDC).
  • Design secrets management and key lifecycle processes using HashiCorp Vault or equivalent, ensuring secure injection for CI/CD and runtime workloads.
  • Lead performance tuning and capacity planning across compute, storage and network layers, provide trend analysis and proactive procurement recommendations.
  • Drive automation of build, deploy and lifecycle operations using Ansible, Chef, Puppet or SaltStack; author runbooks and automate routine maintenance tasks to reduce toil.
  • Define and enforce compliance controls and auditability for industry standards (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI, HIPAA), coordinate with InfoSec and audit teams to remediate findings.
  • Own hardware lifecycle and vendor relationships for servers, storage arrays and network gear: RFPs, evaluation, SLA negotiation, firmware and driver validation.
  • Collaborate with application, data, and platform teams to translate business requirements into resilient infrastructure designs, including multi-cluster and multi-site topologies.
  • Create and maintain infrastructure design documents, standards, network diagrams, runbooks and playbooks for operations and emergency response.
  • Evaluate and pilot new on-prem technologies (HCI, NVMe-oF, persistent storage for containers, GPU/VPU accelerators) to accelerate workload performance at the edge and in the data center.
  • Lead blue/green and canary release patterns for platform upgrades, orchestrating cluster upgrades, compatibility validation, and rollback mechanisms to maintain continuous availability.
  • Mentor and upskill platform, operations and site reliability teams on architecture principles, operational best practices, and troubleshooting methodologies.
  • Implement cost, usage and chargeback models for internal customers, monitor utilization, and recommend consolidation or scale decisions to optimize total cost of ownership (TCO).
  • Design and implement secure connectivity between on-premise environments and public cloud providers (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute), including routing, security, and identity federation for hybrid architectures.
  • Drive shared services and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings internally (CI/CD runners, artifact repositories, service mesh, logging/monitoring), reducing duplication and accelerating developer productivity.
  • Participate in incident management and post-incident reviews for platform-level events; drive root cause analysis and implement permanent fixes to prevent recurrence.
  • Establish SLAs, SLOs and error budgets for infrastructure offerings, and monitor operational health to align platform availability with business expectations.
  • Ensure backups and snapshots meet application recovery objectives and validate restore procedures regularly as part of release and configuration changes.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Coordinate with procurement and finance on vendor contracts, hardware refresh cycles and budget forecasting.
  • Provide pre-sales technical support and feasibility analysis for new customer or product initiatives requiring on-premise deployments.
  • Prepare and deliver executive-level briefings and technical roadmaps that communicate risk, investment needs and timelines.
  • Represent the platform team in architecture review boards and drive governance for infrastructure changes.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep expertise in virtualization platforms (VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX; or OpenStack/Red Hat Virtualization) and lifecycle management of hypervisors.
  • Strong Kubernetes and container platform knowledge (OpenShift, upstream Kubernetes, K3s, Rancher) including cluster design, RBAC, network plugins, and persistent storage integration.
  • Infrastructure-as-code and automation experience with Terraform, Ansible, Cloud-Init, or similar tools; ability to author reusable modules and CI-driven provisioning.
  • Networking fundamentals and advanced skills: BGP, VLANs, VXLAN, load balancers (F5, HAProxy), SDN solutions, and data center routing/switching design.
  • Storage architecture and administration: SAN (iSCSI, Fibre Channel), NAS, HCI platforms (Nutanix, HPE SimpliVity), and familiarity with storage performance tuning.
  • Strong scripting and programming skills (Python, Bash, Go) for automation, tooling and operational runbooks.
  • Observability and logging toolchain experience: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk, and distributed tracing tools (Jaeger, Zipkin).
  • Security and compliance implementation knowledge: host hardening, microsegmentation, encryption, vulnerability scanning, and familiarity with SOC2/ISO27001/PCI/HIPAA requirements.
  • Backup, replication, and disaster recovery technologies (Veeam, Commvault, Zerto) and proven DR orchestration experience.
  • Experience integrating identity/authorization systems (Active Directory, LDAP, SAML, OIDC) and secrets management (HashiCorp Vault).
  • Experience with hardware lifecycle management including BIOS/firmware compatibility testing, procurement and vendor escalation processes.
  • Familiarity with hybrid connectivity technologies: VPN, AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and traffic routing between on-prem and public cloud.
  • Knowledge of platform security controls, network segmentation, WAFs, DDoS protection, and secure ingress patterns.
  • CI/CD platform experience (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Argo CD) and integrating infrastructure automation into pipelines.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communication and stakeholder management — able to present complex technical designs to executives and non-technical audiences.
  • Strategic thinking and architecture-level decision-making; able to balance short-term delivery with long-term platform vision.
  • Leadership and mentoring — proven ability to guide engineers, build consensus and raise team capabilities.
  • Problem-solving and troubleshooting under pressure during critical incidents and outages.
  • Project and program management instincts — plan multi-phase migrations and coordinate cross-functional rollouts.
  • Customer-focused mindset — understands developer experience, internal SLAs, and the needs of product teams.
  • Negotiation and vendor-management skills for hardware and enterprise software contracts.
  • Continuous learning and adaptability to rapidly-evolving infrastructure technologies and operational practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering or related technical field (or equivalent professional experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Systems Engineering or MBA with a technical focus.
  • Relevant industry certifications (VMware Certified Advanced Professional, Red Hat Certified Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator/Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Information Systems / IT Infrastructure
  • Network Engineering / Telecommunications
  • Systems Engineering / Electrical Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 8+ years in data center, infrastructure, or cloud platform engineering with at least 3–5 years in architecture or technical lead roles.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrated track record delivering production-scale private/hybrid cloud platforms and leading cross-functional infrastructure projects.
  • Experience with enterprise compliance environments, DR planning, and multi-site data center operations.
  • Prior experience mentoring teams and defining platform standards and governance.
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