What does an Infrastructure Architect do?
Infrastructure architects plan, design, assemble, and oversee the systems that run an organization’s technological infrastructure. They assess the operation’s existing resources, determine any changes that may be needed, and make recommendations. They also provide ongoing support and advice to ensure the infrastructure continues to support fluctuating demands. Working in collaboration with IT, operations, and other teams, they develop strategies and action plans for implementing upgrades and integrations. They also outline evaluation benchmarks for future assessments.
Infrastructure architects typically have at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field. They often have a strong IT or engineering background. They should have comprehensive knowledge of technical infrastructure systems and the requirements needed to support common business functions. Experience working with virtualization platforms in a cloud environment is helpful.
- Provide architecture leadership across multiple infrastructure teams.
- Engage stakeholders, understand their needs, and then translate those needs into a minimum viable product.
- Provide ongoing advice to projects around technical solutions, best practices, and efficiencies.
- Continuous review of current environment to detect deficiencies, recommend, plan and implement solutions for improvement.
- Provide leadership for strategic planning or complex problem solving for programs and projects including the creation, maintenance, and governance of roadmaps.
- Perform functional allocation to identify required tasks and their interrelationships.
- Develop, implement and practice a robust, quantitative technology evaluation process.
- Document performance criteria and testing strategies, quantify results, trade-offs and recommendations using a data-driven approach to support conclusions.
- Review design documents to ensure that they follow the standards.
- Facilitate, communicate, collaborate and persuade others in defining, adopting and implementing a coherent technical architecture.
- Review all enterprise projects and provide guidance from domain expertise ensuring conformance with domain governance.
- Present the architecture, design documents to the client, rework based on comments and obtain client approval.
- Maintain awareness and expertise of the latest cloud and infrastructure, orchestration, and automation visualization technologies in order to proactively support the adoption of truly beneficial new capabilities.
- Evolve current legacy network service and solution offerings into next generation capabilities aligned to new and emerging business needs.
- Interact with specialists and get their contribution to integrations, securing the application and migration of application as well as data to cloud.
- Drive innovation and improve performance of the applications in scope.
- Provide recommendations and implement ways to modernize technology to meet business demands in a cost-effective manner.
- Bachelor's or Graduate's Degree in computer science, engineering, information systems or information technology, or equivalent experience.
- Exhibit strong leadership and technical leadership skills.
- Comfortable working in an agile and/or scrum operational structure.
- Fluent in a variety of programming languages.
- Expertise with enterprise resource planning tasks.
- Prior experience as a consultant.
- A natural collaborator.
How much does an Infrastructure Architect make?
Base Pay
Additional Pay
$160,482
/ yrInfrastructure Architect Career Path
Learn how to become an Infrastructure Architect, what skills and education you need to succeed, and what level of pay to expect at each step on your career path.
Years of Experience Distribution
Infrastructure Architect Insights
IBM“The people are amazing they really want to help the customers and are some of the best I have worked for”
Amazon“This review is purely based on the 2 months training period without any real project experience”
Autoliv“Financials are good but not the best”
Fyffes“Good good good good gogod”
Cardinal Health“Great salary and benefit options”
Comscore“but the engineering part of that app team is now lost totally so I was finally laid off.”
Amazon Web Services“1. Work on cutting edge 2. Work with the best mind of the world 3. Great for your resume”
Amazon“Best breed of technology and industry projects for career and skill development.”
Frequently asked questions about the roles and responsibilities of an Infrastructure Architect
- Enterprise Architect
- Systems Architect
- Software Architect
- Project Architect