Data Center Architect

Job description

**About Position:** We are seeking a highly experienced Data Center Architect to design, build, and optimize enterprise data center environments that deliver high performance, scalability, and business continuity. This role focuses on driving infrastructure modernization, ensuring operational excellence, and enabling digital transformation through robust data center, storage, and virtualization solutions. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise across compute, enterprise storage platforms, and VMware technologies while supporting large-scale transformations including M&A initiatives. - **Role** : **Data Center Architect** - **Location: All Persistent Location** - **Experience:15+ years** - **Job Type: Full-Time Employment** **What You'll Do:** - The Data Center Architect role is focused on delivering best-in-class data center services that create measurable business value for customers while fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration across employees and partners. - The Data Center Architect collaborates with track leads, service delivery managers, pre-sales, sales, and other internal teams to ensure services meet expected service levels and that continual improvement and service excellence remain core ways of working. Experience in supporting merger and acquisition initiatives is also expected. - The role requires strong knowledge across a broad range of data center services, including infrastructure, servers, hypervisors, storage systems, networking, virtualization, and cloud technologies. - Lead and provide guidance for RFPs, solution defense activities, and large-scale transition and transformation programs. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and execute data center strategies aligned with business goals. - Lead and mentor data center specialists by providing technical direction, coaching, and ongoing support. - Design, implement, and optimize data center infrastructure to support storage, processing, and networking requirements. - Develop comprehensive architecture and design plans based on business requirements, capacity planning, and industry best practices. - Design data center layouts covering physical infrastructure, network connectivity, power distribution, cooling systems, and rack configurations. - Work with stakeholders to translate business needs into data center infrastructure requirements. - Select and procure hardware, equipment, and software based on technical, performance, and cost considerations. - Oversee the installation, configuration, and testing of servers, storage systems, network devices, and backup solutions. - Coordinate with vendors and contractors to ensure successful and timely project delivery. - Monitor and analyze performance metrics such as power consumption, cooling efficiency, network bandwidth, and server utilization. - Identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and improvement opportunities to optimize operations. - Implement load balancing, redundancy, and failover strategies to ensure high availability and fault tolerance. - Partner with operations teams to establish and enforce data center policies, procedures, and best practices. - Develop and implement security controls to protect against physical and cyber threats, including access controls, firewalls, intrusion detection, and encryption. - Design and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans to minimize downtime and data loss. - Conduct regular audits and vulnerability assessments to identify and mitigate security risks. - Maintain detailed documentation for architecture, configurations, and operational procedures. - Provide regular reports and updates to stakeholders on performance, capacity, and future expansion plans. - Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and leading practices in data center design and operations. - Demonstrate strong knowledge of servers, storage, networking, virtualization, and cloud technologies. - Use data center design tools effectively and apply best practices for security, disaster recovery, and business continuity. - Maintain familiarity with regulatory and compliance standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS. - Apply strong problem-solving, analytical, communication, and interpersonal skills when working with stakeholders and cross-functional teams. - Maintain hands-on experience with the technologies listed under Technical Skills. - Work closely with pre-sales and sales teams on new and existing opportunities. - Partner with delivery teams to implement standard best practices that drive consistent service delivery and high customer satisfaction. - Build strong relationships with internal and external customers and key delivery partners through regular engagement, roadmap discussions, and capability evangelization. - Continuously align service delivery processes with client business requirements and promote solution innovation. - Reduce delivery costs through the standardization of service delivery processes and technology solutions. - Implement governance, reporting, and escalation processes across assigned accounts. - Ensure successful execution of due diligence activities and smooth transition of assigned projects into business-as-usual operations. - Coach track leads and subject matter experts in assigned accounts on both technical and management capabilities. **Expertise You'll Bring:** - Strong working knowledge of data center technologies across compute, storage, networking, backup, and automation domains. - Proficiency with VMware vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter Server, along with Hyper-V and Nutanix platforms. - Hands-on experience with vRealize Automation, Aria Operations, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), and Log Insight. - Strong understanding of networking concepts, storage technologies, backup solutions, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, print services, file servers, and database environments. - Knowledge of SAN and NAS architecture, including components, fabric topology, RAID, LUNs, multi