Cloud & Virtualization Architect 14+years

Job Description Role Overview As the Cloud & Virtualization Architect, you will own the design and architecture of the enterprise virtualization platform (primarily Hyper-V) and its hybrid-cloud integration across a large-scale environment. This is a senior architecture and engineering role not an operations or day-to-day administration role. You will define how virtualization clusters are designed, sized, automated, and self-healed, setting the standards and reference architectures that operations teams execute against. You will be the technical authority for cluster performance, capacity/right-sizing, and infrastructure automation, solving the hardest platform-level problems and driving the strategy rather than handling ticket queues. Key Responsibilities Serve as the design authority for the enterprise virtualization platform, primarily Hyper-V (Failover Clustering, storage, and networking design) Architect virtualization clusters for performance, availability, and scale including host standards, HA/failover design, and cluster topology Own capacity planning and right-sizing across the fleet: node sizing, RAM/CPU/storage ratios, HA reservation models, and consolidation ratios grounded in real utilization data Design and drive infrastructure automation and orchestration using Ansible and Terraform provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle as code Architect self-healing infrastructure: automated detection and remediation of host, cluster, and VM health issues to reduce manual intervention Define reference architectures, design standards, and build/validate/release pipelines for virtualization hosts and templates Architect hybrid-cloud and cloud integration (Azure preferred), including landing zone design, connectivity, and workload placement between on-prem and cloud Establish performance baselines and observability standards for cluster health, capacity, and utilization; use data to guide design decisions Partner with compute, storage, network, and security teams to align virtualization design with hardening, compliance, and DR/BC requirements Provide senior-level architecture guidance and root-cause analysis for platform-wide virtualization and performance issues; mentor engineers and set technical direction Qualifications Required Skills & Experience Deep expertise architecting enterprise virtualization at scale, with primary strength in Hyper-V and Failover Clustering (VMware vSphere experience a plus) Proven experience with cluster performance engineering, capacity planning, and rightsizing across large fleets (thousands of VMs / hundreds of hosts) Strong automation and orchestration background: Terraform and Ansible for infrastructure-as-code and configuration management Experience designing self-healing / auto-remediation systems for infrastructure health and reliability Advanced PowerShell scripting for automation, reporting, and remediation Solid understanding of the underlying stack: compute, storage (SAN/NAS/S2D/vSAN), and networking as they relate to virtualization performance Hybrid-cloud and public cloud architecture experience (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP relevant) Strong grasp of HA/DR design, live migration, and workload mobility Ability to operate as an architect: produce reference architectures and design documentation, set standards, and guide execution teams General Skills & Competencies Proactive self-starter who manages time and priorities independently Strong ability to translate business, performance, and capacity needs into comprehensive technical designs while building credibility across teams Clear written and verbal communication; able to deliver formal architecture presentations to technical teams and leadership Data-driven decision-maker who grounds design choices in utilization and performance metrics Mentors engineers, drives platform and process improvements, and keeps current with the virtualization and cloud landscape Experience Required 10+ years in infrastructure engineering with a significant portion in a virtualization architecture or technical lead capacity on large-scale environments Demonstrated ownership of cluster design, capacity/right-sizing, and infrastructure automation (Ansible/Terraform) at scale Additional Information All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines. .