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.

Execution and change control

• 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.

Handover and self-sufficiency

• 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.

Requirements

• Experience depth: 10+ years in infrastructure engineering, with at least 5 as an architect on VMware platforms inside a service provider, cloud provider or large multi-tenant enterprise.
• VCF delivery: Hands-on design and build of VMware Cloud Foundation — SDDC Manager, the installer, management domain bring-up and convergence, workload domain adoption, fleet join and lifecycle operations. Exposure to VCF 9.x is required; the ability to read a vendor release note and know what it means for the upgrade path is essential.
• vSphere at scale: Proven 7.x / 8.x → 9.x upgrade delivery across dozens of vCentres and hundreds of hosts, including rolling host upgrades and vCentre upgrades performed without customer-facing outage.
• NSX: Strong NSX 4.x design and implementation — manager clusters, edges, segments and gateways, multi-tenant networking and topology migration.
• Operations tooling: Design, deployment and content migration of Aria Operations / VCF Operations — dashboards, alerts, notifications, collector groups and cloud proxies — and production experience of integrated versus non-integrated log management.
• Cloud Director: VMware Cloud Director 10.x in a provider VDC environment, including interoperability validation and upgrade planning.
• Change discipline: A track record of authored MOPs, CAB-approved change execution and rollback planning in production multi-tenant estates. You have been in the window at 2 a.m. and it went well because the plan was right.
• Automation: PowerShell / PowerCLI plus SDDC Manager, NSX and platform APIs — anything repeated dozens of times should be scripted, idempotent and logged.
• Communication: Clear written design and as-built documentation, and the ability to hold a room of engineers, delivery partners and account owners to a technical decision.

Nice to Have

• VCDX (DCV or NV), VCAP/VCIX, or the current VCF 9.x certification track.
• Prior delivery inside a VMware Cloud Service Provider organisation, ideally in a top-tier partner tier, where you were the vendor-facing technical contact.
• Direct VCF 9.x experience, including minimal-footprint deployments and the release constraints on supported upgrade paths from current vSphere 8.x and VCF 5.x baselines.
• Mixed-vendor server platform experience across Cisco, Dell and HPE — including blade-to-rack refresh and firmware baseline management.
• Cloud Director upgrade delivery, VCF Automation, or GPU-enabled / private AI workload domain design.
• ITIL-aligned change and release management; experience governing an external professional-services partner rather than only working for one.

What Success Looks Like

• Assessment and design: A validated design, an accepted prerequisite remediation plan and a change-window schedule that the employer and the delivery partner both sign.
• Management domains: All nine sites converged or upgraded to the target VCF release, joined to the fleet and visible in the central operations console on the target bill of materials.
• Workload domains: Every workload vCentre adopted and upgraded to the target release with zero unplanned customer-facing outage and monitoring and log targets intact.
• Cloud Director: Tenant organisations and provider VDCs never lose service; interoperability is validated and documented at every site.
• Handover: As-built documentation and runbooks accepted, and in-house engineering independently performing lifecycle operations before the architect rolls off.

​Hiring Process

• Intro call
• Technical Screening
• Manager Interview
• Client Interview
• Pre-offer stage + reference check (if requested)
• Official offer