Senior Infrastructure Architect

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is hiring a Senior Infrastructure Architect within the Infrastructure and Operations team in the Information Technology and Services (ITS) unit.

Final date to receive applications:
Please note that the Final date to receive applications is 5 November 2026 at the end of day.

Please note that this role is offered as a 3-year fixed term contract.

This role is based in Basel, Switzerland; however, thanks to our status as an international organization, we can hire globally and welcome applications from candidates of all nationalities and located anywhere in the world.

Relocation support is available for the successful candidate and their dependent family members.

As a Senior Infrastructure Architect, you will lead the design and delivery of secure, scalable, and cost-efficient architecture across diverse infrastructure domains.

You will define target state architectures, establish reusable patterns, and provide governance and technical leadership to ensure alignment with business priorities, compliance, and resilience.

At the same time, you will drive operational excellence by fostering collaboration, reducing complexity, and shaping roadmaps for sustainable and efficient infrastructure solutions.

This is a technical role to lead the end-to-end infrastructure architecture for complex, multi-domain initiatives across the organization.

By joining the Infrastructure and Operations team within the ITS unit, you will:
Shape the future of infrastructure by delivering resilient, innovative, and business-aligned architecture across the organization. Join a collaborative team that supports the Bank’s ability to innovate and adapt to new technologies. Benefit from working in a unique, international environment that offers flexible, hybrid working options with a blend of onsite work from our central office location in Basel and home office.

• Owns end-to-end infrastructure architecture for complex, multi-domain initiatives (e.g. compute, storage, networks, cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI)), defining reusable reference designs and patterns to meet availability, performance, scalability, and cost objectives.
• Reviews and approves infrastructure designs for conformance to non-functional requirements (e.g. throughput, latency, IOPS) while ensuring coherence across delivery teams and platforms.
• Authors and maintains infrastructure policies, standards, and reference architectures & roadmaps, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and advising on exceptions with clear justification.
• Acts as a key contributor in governance forums, promoting consistent application of standards and feeding lessons learned into continuous improvement of guardrails and patterns.
• Leads engagement with senior business and technology stakeholders to align infrastructure design with priorities, risk appetite, and non-functional requirements (e.g., SLAs, RPO/RTO, compliance).
• Translates stakeholder needs into architectural principles, guardrails, and prioritised backlogs to guide delivery.
• Defines secure-by-design and resilience patterns (e.g. segmentation, encryption, zero-trust) and validates disaster recovery and backup strategies through scenario-based testing.
• Partners with security, risk, and audit teams to evidence alignment with internal policies and applicable industry standards.
• Provides design authority across delivery teams, resolving cross-team design issues, approving low-level designs, and verifying implementations against architectural intent.
• Steers non-functional testing strategies (e.g., performance, failover, recovery) and ensures readiness criteria for go-live and operational acceptance.
• Leads evaluation and selection of infrastructure technologies, assessing enterprise-wide implications, vendor roadmaps, and EOL/EOS impacts while promoting open standards and APIs.
• Oversees proofs of concept, benchmarks, and rationalisation recommendations aligned with target roadmaps and integration strategies for shared platform services.
• Drivers simplification through standardisation, consolidation, and decommissioning while embedding maintainability and operability criteria (e.g., SLOs, automation guardrails) into architectural artefacts.
• Maintains visibility of platform costs, collaborating with stakeholders to forecast and optimise spend while promoting modern platform capabilities to reduce total cost of ownership.
• Develops own capabilities by…