Senior VMware Architect

Role Summary
You are the technical authority for the fleet program, from validated design through execution and handover. You translate assessment data into a fleet architecture, a per-site design and an executable, low-risk migration plan — then you stay in the change windows to defend it. You work alongside the employer’s platform engineering team and an external professional-services delivery partner, and you are the person leadership and the partner both look to when a design question or an in-window escalation lands.

Responsibilities
Architecture and design

• Fleet and per-site design —Own the conceptual, logical and physical design across all nine sites: a standard management-domain pattern for the larger sites, a minimal-footprint pattern for the smaller ones, and an in-place upgrade of the existing VCF 5.x management domain including VCF Management Services.
• Path validation —Validate the upgrade, converge and import path per vCentre against vendor tooling and supported upgrade-path rules; produce the prerequisite remediation list with named owners and exit criteria.
• Networking and NSX —Design the NSX topology at convergence, including how management and workload networking are separated as sites are brought into the fleet, and own edges, segments, gateways and the customer-networking continuity story.
• Cross-cutting design —Identity, certificates, DNS, syslog and licensing through the provider’s service-provider entitlement — designed once, templated nine times.
• Operations and log management —Design the central operations console as the fleet’s management, monitoring and lifecycle plane, including content preservation for existing dashboards, alerts and reporting; and design log management in the vendor’s multi-instance model, with integrated log management centralised and legacy log clusters retained intact elsewhere with log targets protected through every change.
• Cloud Director —Confirm Cloud Director interoperability with the target VCF release across every Cloud Director site, and own the upgrade design where the program requires it.
• Hardware refresh —Design the integration of refreshed compute into existing clusters — service profiles, firmware baseline, ESX target build, cluster integration, management VM migration — and the clean retirement of end-of-life blade infrastructure.

• Method of procedure —Write the MOPs, runbooks and validation criteria for each change type, with explicit rollback triggers and abort points. Review the delivery partner’s MOPs before they reach CAB.
• In-window leadership —Act as design authority and escalation point during after-hours windows. Coordinate rolling host and networking upgrades, workload domain adoptions, vCentre upgrades and fleet join without unplanned customer downtime.
• Technical governance —Run design conformance reviews against the partner’s deliverables; keep the decision log and risk register honest; recommend sequencing or parallelism changes where they reduce duration or risk.
• Licensing and lifecycle —Own the fleet lifecycle baseline and the licence activation model alongside the provider and the vendor.

• Documentation —Deliver as-built documentation for every VCF Instance plus fleet-level shared services.
• Runbooks and KT —Author the operational runbooks — fleet lifecycle, certificate and password management, host add/remove, workload domain lifecycle, operations content — and run the knowledge transfer that lets in-house engineers operate the fleet independently.
• Decommissioning —Plan and validate the decommissioning of the standalone monitoring instances and legacy log clusters once historical-data retention is confirmed.

• Experience depth:10+ years in infrastructure…