Executive Director - £175k+bonus Investment Banking

Director / Executive Director, Infrastructure Architect Location: London (2-3 days a week) | Type: Permanent | Package: £175,000 + Bonus The role A leading international bank in London is hiring a senior Infrastructure Architect to own its target-state infrastructure across end-user compute, data centres and cloud. The aim is to bring three historically separate estates together into one coherent, cost-managed platform. This is a consolidation and exit role as much as a design role. Success is measured by estate reduction, not estate growth. You'll sit in the Architecture function of the bank's Innovation, Data, Engineering & AI team, reporting to the Head of Architecture. What you'll deliver

• A published target-state infrastructure architecture and placement policy, endorsed at Design Authority
• An agreed and sequenced data centre exit plan, with named workloads, waves and dates
• An approved VDI consolidation roadmap, with the first platform migration wave delivered
• A baseline infrastructure cost model and a committed, measurable path to reducing it What you'll do
• Define the target-state architecture across VDI, physical and colocated data centres, and public cloud, with a clear policy on what runs where and why
• Lead the data centre rationalisation programme: workload discovery and dependency mapping, migration wave planning, exit sequencing, and lease and contract alignment
• Consolidate the VDI and end-user compute estate, including brokers, images, profile management and licensing, and set the roadmap toward a single strategic platform
• Design cloud landing zones, network topology, identity integration and hybrid connectivity to support migration at scale
• Set infrastructure standards for compute and storage tiering, virtualisation, backup, patching and infrastructure-as-code
• Own resilience architecture: DR tiering, RTO/RPO, and failover design and testing, aligned to operational resilience requirements
• Build and maintain the infrastructure cost model, driving unit economics, capacity forecasting and rightsizing
• Partner with network, security, EUC and platform engineering teams to sequence dependencies and avoid stranded estate
• Provide assurance at Design Authority, and challenge project decisions that create new estate outside the target state What we're looking for Essential
• Substantial infrastructure architecture experience in a regulated enterprise, with at least one end-to-end data centre consolidation, migration or exit delivered
• Demonstrable ownership of a VDI or end-user compute estate at enterprise scale, including a platform migration or consolidation
• Hands-on architecture across at least one major public cloud (landing zones, networking, identity and migration patterns)
• Proven workload discovery and dependency analysis for legacy estate, including undocumented systems
• A track record of infrastructure cost reduction backed by evidence, not forecast Technical skills
• VDI / EUC: Citrix, Azure Virtual Desktop, VMware Horizon, Windows 365; image and profile management, application layering, session sizing
• Data centre: virtualisation platforms, SAN/NAS, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, colocation and hosting models, capacity and power planning
• Cloud: Azure and/or AWS landing zones, hybrid connectivity (ExpressRoute, Direct Connect), migration patterns (rehost, re-platform, refactor)
• Network: data centre fabric, segmentation, load balancing, WAN/SD-WAN, DNS, firewall architecture
• Automation: Terraform, Ansible, infrastructure-as-code pipelines, configuration baselining
• Resilience: DR design and testing, backup architecture, multi-site and multi-region patterns Reach out to jhayne@hunterbond.com for more info or apply direct