Principal Architect - Sr Director

Ness Digital Engineering is seeking a dynamic professional  with 15+ years of experience to fill the role of Principal Architect (Sr Director). In this pivotal position, you will lead the charge in steering the AWS cloud, VMWare Infrastructure, and DevSecOps services at Ness, with a primary focus on next-generation product innovation, core competency enhancement, and capability building across diverse geographical locations.  Job Requirements:Note: Shared Infrastructure Below indicate (Rancher-K8s, Containers, VMs, Kafka, Apache Flink/Spark, EDB PostgreSQL, Redis Cache or equivalent, S3/Cloudian, Apigee etc.)  

• Architect global enterprise global enterprise networking operations, and shared infrastructure data center management on AWS and VMware
• Understand the gaps in current state architecture and prepare a blueprint for future state architecture in the areas of network infrastructure, security management and shared infrastructure
• Setup enterprise level standards for network infrastructure, shared infrastructure consumed by the applications and security standards
• Technically oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of security measures across the organization’s networks, infrastructure and applications
• Be a consultant: Ensure success in helping customers accelerate their adoption of our compute, network, storage, and security services. Guide the development of artifacts, data sheets, proof of concept best practices, and other high-value customer facing guidance and best practices.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams, product owners, and stakeholders to ensure security and reliability requirements are integrated into all stages of the development lifecycle
• Communicate effectively with senior management and other departments, providing regular updates on security and reliability initiatives and performance
• Influence automation first mind set and promote automation in all the areas of data center management, security management, infrastructure engineering, compliance reporting and network automation
• Promote use of DevOps/SRE/CI-CD/IAC Best Practices in network and infrastructure automation
• Trusted advisor to customers: Be able to facilitate relationships with senior technical executives, as well as easily interact and give guidance to software developers, IT operations staff, and system architects. Be able to materialize an overall recommendation (or proposal) based on customer
• Set clear goals and performance metrics for the technical teams, conducting regular technical reviews and providing constructive feedback
• Have a business consultant capacity to work with customer’s line-of-business owner; explore improvement areas of customer’s business; and priorities’ strong ROI business initiatives with customers.
• Communicate effectively with senior management and other departments, providing regular updates on security and automation initiatives and performance/reliability/availability of network and shared infrastructure
• Ensure compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements
• Drive continuous improvement in operational processes and engineering practices to enhance system reliability

  

Skills required

• 18+ years’ experience with global enterprise networking operations, data center management, Infrastructure Services in AWS and VMware, you could be a great fit for this role.
• Relevant certifications such as AWS network certification or VMware Network and Security certifications (Equivalent to CISSP, CISM, or SANS GIAC or related).
• 10+ years of experience in designing network and workload isolation, network segmentation ,network security policy definition and network standards (DNS & Subdomain, routing etc.)
• 10+ Years of compute, network, storage, and security services in both AWS and VMware Environments
• 10+ years’ experience in developing and executing strategies for improving security and reliability across all systems and services
• 8+ Years of experience in setting K8s using Rancher, AWS EKS or similar services. Ability to deploy CIS, CSI, Ingress controller, Reverse Proxy and Other instrumentation around Kubernetes clusters
• At least 8+ years of experience in business continuity planning including strategies, implementation, game days, and total cost estimation. Can explain well on the differences between Business continuity plan (BCP), High Availability (HA), Backup & Restore, Disaster Recovery (DR), and Archive.
• 10+ years consulting/pre-sales experience to facilitate relationships with senior technical executives, as well as easily interact and give guidance to software developers, IT operations staff, and system architects.
• 10+ years of experiences in making overall recommendation (or proposal) based on customer needs and efficiently communication formal presentations, white boarding, large and small group presentations in areas of network systems, security engineering infrastructure and automation
• 7+ years of experience in security engineering and/or site reliability engineering, with at least 3 years in a leadership role.
• 5 + years of experience in shared infrastructure services in AWS and VMware environments such as Kafka Stream, Data Pipes (Flink/Spark/Kinesis), Redis Cache, Apigee (API gateway).
• Strong understanding of security principles, practices, and technologies, including encryption, authentication, access control, and network security. Proven experience with reliability engineering practices such as monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance tuning.
• Proven experience with reliability engineering practices such as monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance tuning.
• Proven experience with DevOps practices such as CI-CD and Infrastructure as a code.
• Nice to have: Proficiency in scripting and automation tools, such as Python, Bash, Ansible, or Terraform.
• Nice to have: Experience in implementing Network and infrastructure compliance with financial industry standards and regulatory requirements
• Previous experience in Implementing and maintaining monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes.Optimize system performance and automate repetitive tasks to improve efficiency
• Experience with DevOps practices and tools, such as CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and container orchestration systems (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work under pressure in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and inspire teams.
• Knowledge of compliance frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2.