Infrastructure Architect

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.