Systems Architect/ Manager – Infrastructure & Presales Engineering

Role Summary

The Systems Architect/Manager is responsible for designing infrastructure deployment architectures for the companys software platforms across COTS hardware, virtualization environments, and cloud/container ecosystems. This role focuses on hardware sizing, performance modelling, and infrastructure consulting during presales and implementation stages, ensuring the software runs optimally on customer-provided environments. The individual will collaborate with customers, product teams, and vendors to deliver cost-effective, scalable, and deployment-ready solutions aligned with software workload demands.

Responsibilities

1. Strategic Infrastructure Planning

• Develop infrastructure blueprints for deploying company software on COTS hardware, VM-based environments, and cloud/container platforms.
• Conduct detailed hardware sizing and capacity dimensioning based on workload analysis (CPU, memory, IOPS, storage throughput, redundancy, network bandwidth).
• Ensure proposed deployment architectures (bare metal, virtualized, or containerized) align with customer environments and software performance goals.
• Optimize infrastructure footprint by recommending efficient configurations, virtualization strategies, and hardware consolidation opportunities.
• Track emerging technologies in compute, storage, virtual platforms, orchestrators, and cloud-native environments to enhance deployment capabilities.

2. Presales Support & Solution Engineering

• Lead presales solution design by translating software requirements into infrastructure specifications suited for COTS servers (Dell/HP/Lenovo), VMware/Hyper-V, OpenStack, Kubernetes, or cloud.
• Build sizing calculators, infrastructure templates, and automated BOQ frameworks to accelerate presales cycles.
• Prepare complete Bill of Quantity (BOQ) and infrastructure architecture diagrams for RFP/RFI responses, proposals, and customer presentations.
• Evaluate customers existing IT landscape (DC topology, virtualization stack, IP schema, network capacity, storage setup) and map the deployment plan accordingly.

3. Deployment Architecture & Governance

• Define standard reference architectures for implementation teams covering Virtual machine specs, Container resource policies, Storage allocation, Network segmentation.
• High availability and failover models
• Provide datacentre-level readiness guidelines including racks, cabling, power, cooling, and network prerequisites for customer teams.
• Maintain high-quality documentation for deployment architecture, runbooks, system scaling guidelines, and performance tuning recommendations.
• Ensure compliance with data privacy laws (GDPR, DPDP, CCPA where relevant) and institutional IT governance practices.

4. Vendor Coordination & Cost Modelling

• Coordinate with hardware vendors/system integrators only for price estimation and technical inputs needed to size COTS hardware for customer environments.
• Evaluate and compare vendor hardware configurations to ensure compatibility with software architecture and desired performance.

5. Project Planning & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with product engineering, customer success, delivery teams, and presales to align infrastructure needs with software releases.
• Support implementation teams with installation plans, VM templates, cluster setup guidance, and performance benchmarks.
• Assist in capacity projections and upgrade paths for large-scale or multi-site deployments.

Position Requirements

Technical Knowledge & Experience

• Proven experience sizing infrastructure for software deployments across COTS hardware and virtualized/cloud setups.
• Strong knowledge of virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM), container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure principles (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Understanding of datacentre components (racks, PDUs, cabling, switching, storage) relevant to deployment planning.
• Good understanding of compute/storage/network performance metrics including IOPS, throughput, latency, CPU virtualization, HA clustering, and failover.
• Experience preparing BOQs and performing cost-benefit analysis for infrastructure components.
• Exposure to automation in presales processes (pricing tools, sizing calculators, proposal generators).
• Ability to read and validate hardware specifications for servers, storage arrays, NICs, HBAs, SSD/HDD/NVMe drives, etc.
• Working knowledge of load balancers, firewalls, subnetting, VPNs, VLANs, and IP planning for deployment readiness.

Soft Skills

• Excellent written and verbal communication with ability to simplify complex infrastructure concepts for non-technical audiences.
• Strong analytical and conceptual thinking skills with attention to scalability and performance.
• Ability to work collaboratively across presales, sales, engineering, and customer IT teams.
• Strong documentation habits and a service-oriented mindset.
• Ability to prioritize workloads while managing multiple high-pressure presales and delivery cycles simultaneously.

Preferred Certifications

• Relevant industry certifications such as virtualization (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V), cloud architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP), Linux/system administration, and container orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes). Certifications in server/storage technologies from major OEMs, ITIL for process governance, or architecture frameworks like TOGAF are also beneficial.