Infrastructure Architect

Description:

Introduction

Saab UK is part of Scandinavia's largest defence company, bringing together the best of Swedish and British innovation. Saab offers world-leading solutions and services in defence, aviation, space, and civil security to keep people and society safe. Our UK presence has been growing at pace, meaning we can offer a wide range of opportunities for personal fulfilment and career growth. We currently employ over 600 people across eight sites in the UK, and our specialisations include software engineering, underwater robotics, radars, AI, and armed forces training.

The Role:

This is a 12 month fixed term contract position and can be based remotely anywhere in the UK.

Within Saab UK, Public Safety Solutions (PSS) develops advanced software applications and mission critical solutions used by Police, Fire & Rescue, Airports and other public safety organisations. Our solutions support real-time operational environments where resilience, availability and security are essential.

As part of our continued growth and transformation towards providing managed services, we are looking for an experienced Infrastructure Architect to help shape, design and implement scalable and resilient hosting platforms for mission critical software systems and aid decision making on approach (e.g. public cloud vs private cloud) and other key design choices.

This is a hands-on technical role suited to someone who combines strong architecture capability with practical delivery experience across cloud/on-premise infrastructure, automation, networking, security and operational readiness.

Key Responsibilities:

Design and implement secure, scalable and resilient cloud-hosted managed service platforms

Define infrastructure architecture for mission critical applications, including:

Cloud hosting (public or private cloud)

Networking

Resilience and disaster recovery

High availability

Performance and scalability

Security and operational monitoring

Automated deployment using Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Work closely with software engineering and DevOps teams to enable cloud-native deployment models

Develop and improve infrastructure-as-code and automation capabilities

Support major bids and customer engagements with infrastructure and hosting architecture expertise

Produce high and low-level technical designs and supporting documentation

Define operational readiness requirements for managed service environments

Support platform standardisation, governance and technical assurance activities

Work with customers and third-party suppliers to integrate infrastructure into existing enterprise environments

Contribute to cloud migration, modernisation and platform transformation initiatives

Provide technical leadership and mentoring across infrastructure and platform engineering domains

Support operational teams with third-line technical expertise where required

Qualifications and Skills:

Proven experience as an Infrastructure Architect, Cloud Architect or Platform Architect in complex enterprise environments

Strong hands-on experience designing and implementing cloud-hosted platforms and managed services

Demonstrable experience with cloud hosting (Microsoft Azure, AWS cloud environments or private cloud)

Strong understanding of:

Infrastructure architecture

Cloud networking

Security and identity

Disaster recovery

Resilience engineering

Performance optimisation

Operational support models

Experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation tooling such as:

Terraform

Ansible

Packer

PowerShell

CI/CD pipelines

Experience working with Kubernetes, containers and modern platform technologies

Strong knowledge of networking concepts including:

Firewalls

VPNs

Load balancing

DNS

Routing

SD-WAN

Experience working within highly available or mission critical systems environments

Ability to work across both strategic architecture and practical technical delivery

Strong stakeholder management and communication skills

Comfortable working in Agile and collaborative engineering environments

Knowledge and experience designing and implementing highly-available voice solution

Preferrable experience with UK Emergency Services, Telephony & Airwave (Radio) connectivity / infrastructure

Experience delivering managed services or SaaS platforms

Experience within public safety, defence, government or other highly regulated industries

VMware and hybrid infrastructure experience

By submitting an application to Saab UK you consent to undertaking workforce screening activities that may include but are not limited to: Baseline Personnel Security checks, National Security Vetting, reference checks, verification of working rights and in all circumstances preferred candidates will be placed through a security interview