Lead Architect — Enterprise Ansible Automation; CIQ Ascender Chef Migration

Location
- Raritan, NJ

Duration
- Long-term

Lead the technical vision for one of the largest infrastructure automation transformations in the life sciences industry. You will design an enterprise Ansible platform on CIQ Ascender, stand up an AI-assisted migration factory, move about 1,600 Chef cookbooks to Ansible, and retire Chef across a global, regulated estate. This is a senior, client-facing role: you will be the technical voice the client's CTO organization trusts.

Our client has approved a strategic move from Chef to an enterprise-scale, open-source Ansible platform built on the CIQ Ascender control plane. Funding is approved and the program starts now. It runs from November 2026 to February 2028 across ten milestones: solution design, platform build, CI/CD, an AI-assisted migration factory, discovery, a pilot, large-scale migration across SAP, Web Methods, cloud, and R&D platforms, dual run, and Chef decommissioning.

The scope includes Windows and Linux OS hardening, database automation, security and observability agents, and platform automation for SAP, Web Methods, CLOUDx and IM R&D environments. The delivery model combines a small onshore leadership team with an offshore engineering factory.

As Lead Architect, you are the single technical authority for the program. You own the target-state architecture, the migration approach and the quality of everything the team delivers. You chair the design authority, present to the client's architecture review board, and give the go/no-go recommendation for every production cutover and for Chef's final retirement.

You will spend a large share of your time with client stakeholders: architects, Information Security, infrastructure, operations and platform owners. The right person earns their confidence in the first weeks and keeps it for the life of the program. You combine deep, hands-on Ansible and platform expertise with the presence to lead executive conversations and the judgment to settle hard technical trade-offs.

• Act as the senior technical point of contact for the client's CTO organization, enterprise architects, Information Security, infrastructure and operations leaders.
• Lead architecture workshops, design reviews and executive briefings; turn complex technical choices into clear options, risks and recommendations.
• Present and defend the target architecture at the client's architecture review board and steering committee.
• Build lasting relationships with platform owners across Core infrastructure, CLOUDx, SAP, Web Methods and IM R&D, and settle cross-team technical conflicts.
• Spot opportunities to add value beyond scope and raise them with the engagement executive.

• Design the enterprise, platform and security architecture for CIQ Ascender: HA control plane on Kubernetes, external PostgreSQL, execution node mesh with hop nodes for segmented zones, Private Automation Hub, Git integration and SSO.
• Define the automation operating model: organizations, RBAC mapped to directory groups, content ownership and the release lifecycle.
• Design credential management with the enterprise vault so that no secrets live in source control.
• Set Ansible content standards: collection and role structure, variable hierarchy, execution environments, naming and documentation.
• Own architecture decision records and the reference architecture for the life of the program.

• Design the migration factory end to end: automated discovery, classification, AI-assisted conversion, test gates and release.
• Approve Chef-to-Ansible mapping patterns and the reusable collections each migration wave builds on.
• Make the final call on complex conversions: custom resources and libraries, heavy Ruby logic, search-based patterns, data bags, and SAP or GxP-validated cookbooks.
• Set rationalization rules for retiring, merging or migrating cookbooks, and approve the wave plan from a technical-risk standpoint.
• Work with AI specialists to tune conversion tooling and raise the AI-assisted conversion rate over time.

• Make sure the platform meets enterprise security standards: CIS hardening, least privilege, segmentation, audit logging and content signing.
• Lead the security review and approval of AI/LLM tooling, including data handling and tenancy.
• Make sure Ansible hardening content maps fully to existing Chef-enforced controls, with nothing…