Infrastructure / Cloud Hosting Architect - freelance - hybrid, London, UK
Comgent · Greater London, England, United Kingdom
IT Services and IT Consulting · 11-50 employees
About the role
The role involves developing and owning a comprehensive hosting architecture strategy across on-premises, cloud, and co-location environments. You will be responsible for rationalizing the existing estate, designing standardized landing zones, and creating a roadmap for workload migration and consolidation.
What they look for
Requirements
Candidates must possess broad infrastructure architecture experience across on-premises and cloud platforms, specifically with Azure and AWS. Strong communication skills and commercial awareness are required to build business cases and present architectural decisions to senior stakeholders.
Full description
The organisation operates a fragmented hosting estate comprising on-premises data centres (Hitachi and Cisco UCS compute), legacy cloud deployments (Azure), co-location facilities, and external service provider connectivity (Bloomberg, Refinitiv, FX platforms). There is no overarching hosting strategy or defined landing zones. This role will develop and own the hosting architecture strategy across all categories, rationalising the current estate and defining scalable, repeatable patterns for future service deployment.
Key responsibilities
- Define a comprehensive hosting strategy spanning on-premises, hyperscaler (Azure, AWS), co-location, and managed service environments
- Design and implement standardised cloud landing zones by service category, enabling repeatable, governed deployment patterns
- Assess the existing Azure environment (built during COVID) and determine appropriate target architecture and integration with on-premises systems
- Develop a hosting rationalisation roadmap, identifying workloads for migration, consolidation, or retirement
- Define ISP and external connectivity architecture, rationalising current fragmented peering arrangements
- Evaluate market data and financial services connectivity requirements (Bloomberg, Refinitiv, Trade Point, FX platforms)
- Work with network and security architects to ensure hosting design aligns with network and security standards
- Produce total cost of ownership models and capacity plans across the hosting estate
- Evaluate suitability of Hitachi and NTT infrastructure offerings in the context of the broader strategy
Requirements
Technical requirements
- Broad infrastructure architecture experience across on-premises and cloud platforms
- Azure architecture: landing zones, hybrid connectivity, governance frameworks
- AWS architecture experience desirable
- Compute platforms: Cisco UCS, Hitachi, HPE or equivalent
- Virtualisation: VMware vSphere / NSX, Citrix (evaluation and rationalisation experience)
- Storage and data centre infrastructure design
- Understanding of financial services connectivity: co-location, proximity hosting, market data feeds
- ISP connectivity, BGP peering, and internet edge design
- Cloud migration methodologies and workload assessment frameworks
Advantageous
- Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect (AZ-305) or equivalent
- Experience with Oracle Cloud or other tier-2 hyperscalers
- Knowledge of offshore delivery model integration
- FinOps practices and cloud cost management
Soft skills
- Strategic thinker with the ability to translate business requirements into architectural decisions
- Strong written and verbal communication — able to produce clear architecture documentation and present to senior stakeholders
- Commercial awareness: able to build business cases and challenge incumbent vendor pricing
- Comfortable operating in an environment undergoing significant organisational change
