The Principal Infrastructure Architect at BCBSA, will lead the design, delivery, and integration of appropriate network, data center, cloud, and end user solutions to enable robust and reliable infrastructure services and capabilities that fully support business applications, data, connectivity, and collaboration tools used by BCBSA business, users, and Plans. In this highly specialized role, the Principal Infrastructure Architect at BCBSA will partner with executive level cross functional teams and other business leaders, IT, security teams and other stakeholders to understand the broader vision and pathways to deliver BCBSA optimized strategies and capabilities to translate that vision into the infrastructure technological and process requirements. This role will design, develop, and implement Infrastructure standards, architectures, and technical specifications, leveraging industry leading practices to support technology applications and recommend future investments and infrastructure services roadmaps. The Principal Infrastructure Architect will also serve as the voice of infrastructure architecture for strategic initiatives, adoption programs, and in charting the course for secure infrastructure-as-code and reliable product adoption. This role will work to architect and deliver agile ways to consistently deliver infrastructure capabilities throughout the product and/or program lifecycle.

Develops short- and long-term infrastructure technology roadmaps aligned with business application and end user services strategies and direction. Partners with the Enterprise and Solution Architect teams and IT leadership to assess business application lifecycles and develop appropriate infrastructure refresh, maintain, or migrate to cloud plans in support of hybrid data center and cloud environments focusing on functional and cost optimization.

Serves as the subject matter expert in one or more infrastructure domains leading technology design, development, and implementation in support of products, solutions, and business functionality enablement. Drafts and reviews standards and guidelines to enhance and ensure that sound end-to-end infrastructure principles are designed and delivered to meet business use cases and requirements. Establishes architecture design principles and practices to improve performance, effectiveness, security, reliability, and scalability of solutions.

Translate infrastructure roadmap into actionable plans, business justification, and budget proposals by coordinating and influencing across IT teams and business teams to align annual project priorities and budgets. Socialize and propose projects and solutions to senior business to gain consensus and support.

Analyzes, recommends, and implements advanced and innovative infrastructure solutions. Leads testing, deployment, and continuous improvement of hybrid data center, cloud, and end user solutions.

Partner across infrastructure and IT teams to perform periodic infrastructure architectural reviews for major application environments to identify risks and ensure appropriate capacity, reliability, redundancy, and disaster recovery. Recommend changes and enhancements based on review to ensure viability of environment and alignment with product and infrastructure roadmaps. Ensue architectual solution diagrams are updated and kept current.

Education

High School Diploma or GED
Bachelor's degree or relevant work experience.

Certifications
ITIL, AWS Architect, Enterprise Architect, Agile, DevSecOps

Experience

CORE INFRASTRUCTURE: Requires a minimum of eight (8) years of relevant infrastructure architecture or engineering experience in on-prem data center, network, storage, and compute.Experience with architecting end-to-end solutions involving data center rack and wiring design, SAN/NAS, Data Replication, Blade Server, Hypervisors, Virtualization, WAN/LAN, Firewall, SDWAN, Load Balancer, disaster recovery.

MIDDLEWARE and DATABASE: Requires a minimum of eight (3) years of relevant infrastructure architecture or engineering experience in middleware, application server, and database technologies.Experience with architecting end-to-end solutions involving databases, messaging systems, application servers, data warehouse, data lakes, ETL.

PUBLIC CLOUD: Requires a minimum of three (3) years of relevant public cloud architecture or engineering experience, preferably leading on-prem application migrations to AWS or Azure. Experience leveraging migration tools or platforms such as Software Defined Data Center approaches for large scale migrations.

Eight (8) or more years of relevant technical and business experience preferred, such as:

Security Architect

Enterprise Architect

Solution Architect

Technical Team Lead

End User and Collaboration: Familiarity remote access technologies, Collaboration tools such as MS Teams, Virtual Desktop, Internet Gateway Security, and modern service edge protection solutions such as Zscaler.

Skills

Interpersonal Relationships - Knowledge of the techniques and the ability to work with a variety of individuals and groups in a constructive and collaborative manner.

Problem Solving - Knowledge of approaches, tools, techniques for recognizing, anticipating, and resolving organizational, operational or process problems; ability to apply this knowledge appropriately to diverse situations.

Leadership - Ability to work with a group to set its objectives and agenda, generate allegiance to those objectives, and guide and motivate their achievement.

Industry Knowledge - Knowledge of the organization's industry group, trends, directions, major issues, regulatory considerations, and trendsetters; ability to apply this knowledge appropriately to diverse situations.

IT Environment - Knowledge of organization's total Information Technology (IT) environment with minimum knowledge of MS office and other software's used by the organization.

Effective communication skills - (written and verbal) to document and properly articulate complicated infrastructure strategies and proposals to business, management and other IT development partners.

People Management

No