Enterprise Solutions Architect

Overview

We are seeking an experienced Enterprise Solutions Architect with proven Oracle expertise and strong Azure experience, including migration projects. This role involves close collaboration with the client’s Enterprise Solution Architect to deliver large-scale, innovative solutions.

• Architecture Leadership & Governance:
  Provide technical authority and architecture governance across all programme work streams, ensuring consistency, scalability, and resilience of the overall solution. Define and maintain solution architecture patterns, design standards, and best practices for Oracle, Azure IaaS, and hybrid environments. Own the technical design documentation and architecture decision records (ADRs), keeping them current as the solution evolves. Refine the architecture as new issues, dependencies, and risks are identified.
  
  Ensure all designs meet security standards, compliance requirements, and risk frameworks. Facilitate workshops and requirements discovery to align on value-driven business outcomes.
• Oracle Upgrade Strategy & Execution:
  Lead definition and execution planning for the Oracle database upgrade strategy, including version assessment, upgrade path selection, and go/no-go criteria. Analyze the Oracle database estate with SMEs, identify performance issues, risks, inefficiencies, and version-specific constraints. Develop technical recommendations and mitigation strategies, including schema changes, deprecated feature remediation, and compatibility fixes. Design workarounds and optimisation approaches as issues emerge. Validate upgrade outcomes through performance benchmarking, regression testing governance, and post-upgrade health checks.
• VMware Removal & Workload Re-platforming:
  Lead the technical strategy for VMware decommissioning, including workload inventory, dependency mapping, and VM re-platforming prioritisation. Assess workload characteristics to determine lift-and-shift, re-platform, or re-architect approaches. Define and govern the migration sequencing plan to minimise service disruption during the removal of the VMware layer. Resolve blockers from VMware configurations, custom networking, and storage dependencies.
• AVS to Azure IaaS Migration:
  Work with the Microsoft CAF team to architect the migration from Azure VMware Solution (AVS) to native Azure IaaS, leveraging Azure Migrate, ASR, and related tooling. Redesign workload architectures for Azure-native patterns where appropriate, including compute sizing, managed disk selection, virtual networking, and availability zone placement. Define and enforce networking migration patterns (VNET design, NSG rulesets, private endpoints, and Express Route/VPN continuity).
  
  Ensure landing zone readiness with governance controls, RBAC, tagging policies, and security baselines before migration.

• Role collaboration:
  Work with client architecture and engineering stakeholders, communicate complex decisions clearly, translate findings into client-ready artefacts (architecture documents, risk assessments, decision papers, executive summaries), provide technical oversight of third-party vendors and Oracle SMEs, and support governance, steering committee updates, and risk escalations. Contribute to pre-sales and bid activity where required with technical solution design, estimating, and architecture narratives for proposals.

• 12–18+ years in solution architecture or technical leadership roles, with a track record of delivery in large-scale enterprise transformation programmes.
• Deep, hands-on Oracle expertise: performance tuning, version upgrades (e.g., 11g to 19c), migration planning, schema analysis, and post-upgrade remediation.
• Proven Azure cloud architecture experience:
  IaaS design (VM, storage, networking, identity), Azure Migrate, ASR, landing zones, and hybrid connectivity.
• Direct experience delivering VMware workload migrations — including AVS, vSphere, and vCenter environments — to cloud-native or IaaS targets.
• Strong understanding of enterprise security principles: identity and access management, network security, encryption at rest/in transit, and compliance frameworks.
• Background in consulting or professional…