Senior Technical Architect, Infrastructure and Cloud

Job Description

What you get to do in this role:

The senior technical architect, infrastructure and cloud sets direction for how our corporate and cloud infrastructure evolves to support secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective business services. As part of the technical architecture team, this role connects infrastructure and cloud decisions to enterprise architecture and the broader technology roadmap. The role researches new technologies, advises on current solutions, and drives improvement, including upgrades, retirements, and replacements. This is a senior individual contributor role that sets direction through standards, roadmaps, guardrails, and architecture decisions. You will not run day-to-day operations or build infrastructure yourself. You will make sure the teams that do have a coherent target architecture, practical guardrails, and a clear path from where we are to where we need to be.

Scope

This role advises on and supports infrastructure and cloud architecture for technologies outside the ServiceNow platform: data centers, public and hybrid cloud, compute, storage, networking and connectivity, backup and recovery, and the infrastructure dependencies of corporate systems. Other teams continue to own the systems they run. This role works with them to shape direction, standards, and decisions.

This role does not cover ServiceNow platform instance architecture or configuration, or AI and data architecture, although it does support the infrastructure that AI and data workloads run on. Enterprise security architecture sits with the security architecture team. You will partner with that team closely, as a peer stakeholder in architecture forums.

What you will own

• Help define the current-state, transition-state, and target-state infrastructure and cloud architecture, with a multiyear roadmap tied to business priorities, risk, lifecycle, capacity, and cost. Help align that direction with enterprise architecture principles and the broader technology roadmap, and surface dependencies that affect enterprise plans.

• Establish reference architectures, principles, standards, and patterns across cloud, data center, networking, compute, storage, containers, and backup. Advise on infrastructure as code and policy as code, and support delivery teams in adopting them.

• Help define cloud governance, standards, and architectural guardrails for Azure and GCP, including account and subscription structure, landing zones, cost controls, and policy as code. Advise teams on operating within them, and surface where a guardrail needs to change.

• Lead infrastructure architecture reviews and provide architecture input on major technical decisions. Help scope proofs of concept and vendor evaluations. Evaluate options, document tradeoffs, risks, and value, fit, operability, and total cost, and help drive decisions to closure with accountable stakeholders.

• Recommend resilience and compliance requirements for high availability, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, and continuity, and help align recovery objectives with business criticality.

• Partner with Security Architecture on resilience, compliance, and zero-trust, so that security requirements are built into infrastructure and cloud standards from the start.

• Look ahead to AI and ML infrastructure needs, including compute capacity, specialized hardware, data storage, and hybrid hosting. Understand the agentic AI patterns, such as RAG, A2A, and MCP, that shape those needs. Research emerging technologies that could change how we build and run infrastructure, and advise on when to adopt them.

• Default to out-of-the-box capabilities. Recommend a documented case for any custom pattern or exception and advise on retiring custom solutions where a standard capability will do.

• Support and collaborate regularly with the DT Integration, Core Systems, and Product teams to align infrastructure needs, dependencies, and roadmaps. Advise these teams on the infrastructure implications of their integration, core system, and product decisions, and help plan changes that depend on shared infrastructure.

• Partner with finance and operations to inform infrastructure economics through capacity planning, lifecycle management, workload placement, and FinOps practices. Draw on incidents, capacity trends, audit findings, and resilience test results to inform standards and roadmaps.

• Represent infrastructure and cloud in the architecture team and its governance forums, including the Architecture Review Board. Build trusted relationships with senior technology and business leaders, and mentor architects and engineers.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

• 10+ years of progressive experience in infrastructure, cloud, platform engineering, or systems engineering, including substantial architecture responsibility for complex enterprise environments.

• Demonstrated success defining infrastructure and cloud strategy and roadmaps that span multiple technology domains and delivery teams.

• Deep expertise in several infrastructure domains, with enough breadth to make integrated decisions across cloud, network, compute, storage, resilience, and cost.

• Strong working knowledge of Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) architecture, including landing zones, connectivity, identity dependencies, workload placement, and shared-responsibility models.

• Solid understanding of agentic AI concepts and patterns, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent-to-agent (A2A) communication, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and related technologies.

• Experience integrating disparate systems, with a strong understanding of enterprise integration patterns, such as APIs, messaging, and event-driven architecture.

• Experience defining cloud governance, guardrails, and standards in a large enterprise, and getting teams to adopt them.

• Experience creating and governing reference architectures, standards, and architecture decision records.

• Working knowledge of infrastructure as code and modern automation practices.

• Ability to evaluate architecture choices on business value, risk, cost, and operational evidence, not technology preference.

• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and technical teams without relying on direct authority.

• Clear written and verbal communication for both engineering and executive audiences.

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in a large, global, regulated, or mission-critical environment.

• Familiarity with IT service management practices, including the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and with configuration management database (CMDB) alignment for infrastructure configuration items.

• Familiarity with enterprise architecture frameworks, such as TOGAF or COBIT, or equivalent.

• Experience with release planning using Agile and Scrum practices.

• Familiarity with AI and ML infrastructure requirements, such as GPU and accelerator capacity, and with zero-trust architecture.

• Experience with FinOps, technology portfolio management, and infrastructure cost modeling.

• Relevant architecture, cloud, networking, security, or infrastructure certifications.

• Experience guiding vendor strategy or major platform selection.

JV20

…