Lead Infrastructure Architect

About Us

Are you ready to transform lives through academic excellence, innovative research, strong community partnerships and economic opportunity? Kennesaw State University is one of the 50 largest public institutions in the country. With growing enrollment and global reach, we continue to expand our institutional influence and prominence beyond the state of Georgia. We offer more than 190 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees to empower over 50,000 students to become thought leaders, lifelong learners, and informed global citizens.

Our entrepreneurial spirit, high-impact research, and Division I athletics draw students from throughout the region and from more than 100 countries across the globe. Our university's vibrant culture, career opportunities, rich benefits, and values of respect, integrity, collaboration, inclusivity, and accountability make us an employer of choice. We are part of the University System of Georgia. We are searching for talented people to join Kennesaw State University in our vision.

Come Take Flight at KSU!

Location

(Primary Location for

Job Responsibilities ) Our Kennesaw campus is located at 1000 Chastain Road NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144.

Our Marietta campus is located at 1100 South Marietta Parkway, Marietta, GA 30060.

Job Summary

Is responsible for defining and owning the long-term enterprise network and infrastructure architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with business objectives, capacity planning, and emerging technology trends. This role provides architectural governance, resiliency planning, and technical leadership across on premises, hybrid, and cloud-connected infrastructure environments. This position collaborates closely with engineering, cybersecurity, and cloud teams to ensure scalable, secure, and highly available infrastructure solutions.

Responsibilities

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

1. Define and maintain the long-term network and infrastructure architecture roadmap aligned with business strategy, scalability, and capacity planning objectives.

2. Design and govern physical infrastructure standards including data centers, cabling, rack layouts, power distribution, and hardware placement.

3. Lead capacity planning and performance engineering to ensure infrastructure meets current and future demand with redundancy and failover.

4. Lead network modeling, simulation, and validation activities to ensure design integrity and reduce deployment risk.

5. Design and maintain high-availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity network architectures.

6. Evaluate and manage strategic vendors, carriers, and service providers to ensure architectural alignment and cost efficiency.

7. Develop and maintain high-level and low-level design documentation and reference architectures.

8. Provide architectural oversight and governance for infrastructure projects to ensure adherence to approved standards and designs.

9. Partners with cybersecurity teams to embed security architecture principles including segmentation, zero trust, and compliance requirements.

10. Drive infrastructure automation initiatives using infrastructure as code and configuration management tools.

11. Lead root cause analysis and post-incident reviews, translating findings into architectural improvements.

12. Define, track, and report on infrastructure KPIs and SLOs for reliability, latency, and availability.

13. Guide integration of on-premises infrastructure with cloud and hybrid connectivity models.

14. Evaluate emerging technologies such as SD-WAN, SASE, EVPN/VXLAN, and high-speed fabrics for enterprise adoption.

15. Provide mentorship and architectural leadership to senior engineers and technical teams.

16. Support audits and compliance activities by ensuring infrastructure designs meet regulatory and policy requirements.

17. Contribute to budget planning, lifecycle management, and cost optimization initiatives.

Required Qualifications

Educational Requirements

Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution of higher education, preferably in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field or an equivalent combination of education and/or experience.

Required Experience

Seven (7) years of experience designing, supporting, and architecting enterprise-scale network and infrastructure environments.

Preferred Qualifications

Additional

Preferred Qualifications

Industry certifications such as Cisco CCNP or CCIE, AWS Advanced Networking, Microsoft Azure Network Engineer, CompTIA Network+, or ITIL.

Preferred Educational Qualifications

An advanced degree from an accredited institution of higher learning in a related field.

Preferred Experience

Experience with hybrid cloud connectivity, private circuits, and high-availability enterprise network designs.

Demonstrated experience leading architectural reviews, standards development, and infrastructure governance.

Experience mentoring senior engineers or architects in complex enterprise environments.

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities

ABILITIES

Ability to translate business…