Senior Technical Architect, Infrastructure and Cloud

What you get to do in this role: The senior technical architect, infrastructure and cloud sets direction for how our corporate and cloud infrastructure evolves to support secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective business services. As part of the technical architecture team, this role connects infrastructure and cloud decisions to enterprise architecture and the broader technology roadmap. The role researches new technologies, advises on current solutions, and drives improvement, including upgrades, retirements, and replacements. This is a senior individual contributor role that sets direction through standards, roadmaps, guardrails, and architecture decisions. You will not run day-to-day operations or build infrastructure yourself. You will make sure the teams that do have a coherent target architecture, practical guardrails, and a clear path from where we are to where we need to be.  Scope  This role advises on and supports infrastructure and cloud architecture for technologies outside the ServiceNow platform: data centers, public and hybrid cloud, compute, storage, networking and connectivity, backup and recovery, and the infrastructure dependencies of corporate systems. Other teams continue to own the systems they run. This role works with them to shape direction, standards, and decisions.  This role does not cover ServiceNow platform instance architecture or configuration, or AI and data architecture, although it does support the infrastructure that AI and data workloads run on. Enterprise security architecture sits with the security architecture team. You will partner with that team closely, as a peer stakeholder in architecture forums.  What you will own  • Help define the current-state, transition-state, and target-state infrastructure and cloud architecture, with a multiyear roadmap tied to business priorities, risk, lifecycle, capacity, and cost. Help align that direction with enterprise architecture principles and the broader technology roadmap, and surface dependencies that affect enterprise plans.  • Establish reference architectures, principles, standards, and patterns across cloud, data center, networking, compute, storage, containers, and backup. Advise on infrastructure as code and policy as code, and support delivery teams in adopting them.  • Help define cloud governance, standards, and architectural guardrails for Azure and GCP, including account and subscription structure, landing zones, cost controls, and policy as code. Advise teams on operating within them, and surface where a guardrail needs to change.  • Lead infrastructure architecture reviews and provide architecture input on major technical decisions. Help scope proofs of concept and vendor evaluations. Evaluate options, document tradeoffs, risks, and value, fit, operability, and total cost, and help drive decisions to closure with accountable stakeholders.  • Recommend resilience and compliance requirements for high availability, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, and continuity, and help align recovery objectives with business criticality.  • Partner with Security Architecture on resilience, compliance, and zero-trust, so that security requirements are built into infrastructure and cloud standards from the start.  • Look ahead to AI and ML infrastructure needs, including compute capacity, specialized hardware, data storage, and hybrid hosting. Understand the agentic AI patterns, such as RAG, A2A, and MCP, that shape those needs. Research emerging technologies that could change how we build and run infrastructure, and advise on when to adopt them.  • Default to out-of-the-box capabilities. Recommend a documented case for any custom pattern or exception and advise on retiring custom solutions where a standard capability will do.  • S