Enterprise Infrastructure & Cloud Architect

West Suburban Chicago | Hybrid, 3 days onsite | Direct Hire

A large, multi-site organization is hiring an Enterprise Infrastructure & Cloud Architect to set the technical direction for its infrastructure environment and then build it. This is not a diagram-and-hand-off role. You will own how infrastructure gets designed, provisioned, and operated, and you will be in the code when the work calls for it.

The environment spans a national footprint of physical locations supporting a workforce in the tens of thousands, with an endpoint count to match. Operating at that scale brings problems that a 20-location environment never surfaces, and the person in this seat is expected to have seen those problems before.

The organization has grown quickly and is partway through a multi-year assessment of its technology environment. You will come in at the ground level of that work, reporting to the Senior Manager of Infrastructure Platforms and collaborating with a team of eight, plus dozens of stakeholders across the business.

What you'll do

• Own the architecture of the AWS environment across compute, networking, storage, and container platforms, and set the standards the rest of the organization builds against
• Build repeatable, version-controlled infrastructure in Terraform, replacing fragile manual setups with something the whole team can extend and trust
• Design and operate production Kubernetes, including cluster networking, scaling, and workload isolation
• Build and secure the CI/CD pipelines that move infrastructure and application deployments from commit to production
• Lead planning for the next generation of the network
• Standardize identity across the organization
• Develop the observability strategy and a modern virtual desktop strategy
• Make the calls on security, observability, and cost tradeoffs, with the authority to make them stick
• Take the cross-cutting problems that span networking, compute, identity, and deployment, where someone has to hold the whole picture
• Present recommendations to leadership and adjust the message for the audience in the room

What we're looking for

• 7 or more years across infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or cloud architecture
• Architecture experience in an enterprise environment with several hundred physical locations, thousands of users, and a comparable endpoint footprint. This is the first thing we screen on
• Ownership that extended past cloud. We want someone who has personally architected across networking, identity, and security, not only AWS
• Deep, hands-on AWS experience architecting and operating real environments. Azure exposure is welcome as a complement, but AWS depth is required
• Strong Terraform, including module design and state management at scale
• Production Kubernetes, at the platform and operator level rather than as a consumer of someone else's clusters
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, with security built into them
• A record of rolling out infrastructure change to thousands of users or endpoints with minimal business disruption
• Working knowledge of Zero Trust and broader infrastructure security architecture
• Roughly an even split between big-picture architecture and implementation. Both halves matter here
• The ability to hold a conversation from the C-suite down to the engineering team and be credible in both rooms
• A self-starter who can assess an unfamiliar environment quickly and make an early impact

Ideal background

Multi-location environments with real scale translate best here, whether that's retail, logistics, distribution, or a similar footprint. We are looking for people who have owned an environment day to day rather than advised on one, so hands-on backgrounds land better than pure consulting. If you have demonstrable, specific impact you can point to and explain in business terms, we want to hear about it. Interest in building reports and presentations for leadership is a plus.

MMD Services Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants are considered for all positions without regard to race, religion, color, sex, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, national origin, ancestry, physical/mental disability, medical condition, military/veteran status, genetic information, marital status, ethnicity, alienage or any other protected classification, in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.