About the Role

We are seeking a seasoned, battletested Infrastructure Architect to act as a "Trusted Advisor" to the IT Architecture Team and our internal infrastructure team. This is not a cloud evangelist to design our targetstate Azure infrastructure, rather a highly deliberate, 3month tactical execution role with a key focus on Networking, Hybrid Infrastructure, migration and governance.

You will be parachuted into an active program to help with the technical governance of a complex hybrid migration. You will bridge the gap between vendor designs and the reality of our legacy on-premises environment. Your mandate is to capture critical technical decisions, define the transition architecture and migration plans, and produce unambiguous, actionable plans that our internal engineers can directly implement.

Key Responsibilities

• Trusted Advisory & Governance:Serve as the technical sounding board for the internal team, evaluating vendor proposals and ensuring migration strategies are realistic, safe, and viable for our specific environment.
• Transition Architecture:Define the "how" rather than the "what." Focus heavily on the interim states required to move workloads safely while maintaining integration with a permanent, retained on-premises infrastructure.
• Actionable Documentation:Translate complex migration concepts into precise, step-by-step engineering artifacts, decision logs, and wave-planning documents for the internal infrastructure team. No fluff, no ambiguity.
• Hybrid "Plumbing" Focus:Solve the hard infrastructure problems: ensuring ultra-low latency across ExpressRoute for "split-tier" applications, managing Domain Controller placement, and transitioning backup/DR paradigms without risking data loss.

Required Experience & Technical Skills

We need an architect whose roots are in enterprise infrastructure, with proven expertise from driving large-scale cloud migrations.

• Traditional Infrastructure:Deep expertise in VMware environments and an understanding of physical compute/storage constraints.
• Hybrid Networking:Mastery of the connective tissue between on-prem and cloud. Must have hands-on architectural knowledge of ExpressRoute, VPNs, and Palo Alto firewalls.
• Identity & Directory:Strong practical knowledge of traditional Active Directory, Domain Controllers, and identity synchronization (Microsoft Entra ID).
• Data Protection:Proven ability to architect seamless transitions for Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions during a migration phase.
• Migration Mechanics:Deep familiarity with workload migration tools, dependency mapping, and right-sizing strategies.

The Ideal Candidate

You are an infrastructure veteran who prefers solving complex, practical engineering problems over drawing theoretical enterprise frameworks. You understand the "data gravity" challenges of keeping heavy databases on-premises while moving application tiers to the cloud. You are highly structured, communicate clearly, and excel in a 3-month sprint where specific deliverables, technical governance, and actionable outcomes are the only measures of success.

Please apply with current resume in Microsoft Word format only (.doc or .docx). If you would like to have a confidential discussion, please contact Krunal Patel on Kru•••••••••@davidsonwp.com, quoting reference JN -062026-43513. Want to know more about Davidson? Visit us at www.davidsonwp.com