Infrastructure Architect

Freelance Technical Infrastructure Architect, Web Hosting & Web Security

📍 Brussels, Belgium (hybrid)

📄 Freelance contract

🕒 Full-time, 40 hours per week

About the role

A leading European bank is looking for a freelance Technical Infrastructure Architect to join the Technical Design squad within its Agile Production Services tribe, working hybrid from Brussels. The tribe delivers and maintains critical infrastructure services for the bank, with a primary focus on web infrastructure and applications. Its work covers technical architecture, the industrialisation of web infrastructure and security assets, 24/7 production support, and the secure integration of web applications in line with group-wide standards.

You will sit at the intersection of design and operations. You will write detailed technical designs for new and evolving workflows, lead deep-dive analysis of production incidents and performance bottlenecks, and turn business requirements into robust, future-proof solutions.

Key responsibilities

Architecture & design

• Provide Web Hosting and Web Security architectural expertise to projects, delivering artefacts that define and implement the right architecture choices.
• Develop and own Detailed Technical Design (DTD) documents for new or updated projects. This means expanding on high-level architecture documents from Enterprise Architecture and clarifying workflows, integration points and technical dependencies.
• Analyse end-to-end application flows to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks and failure points, and build performance and scalability considerations into designs.

Incident & performance analysis

• Lead technical investigations into production incidents, using logs, traces and APM data to isolate root causes.
• Run performance benchmarking and capacity planning for WebSphere and cloud (IaaS/PaaS) environments.
• Document findings and recommend architectural improvements to prevent recurrence.

Collaboration & standards

• Review and validate designs with project architects, infrastructure engineers and development teams, acting as subject-matter expert for technical queries.
• Contribute to reference architectures for web infrastructure.
• Share best practice on performance tuning, flow optimisation and incident troubleshooting.
• Work closely with Security, Network and DevOps to deliver an end-to-end view of solutions.

Optimisation

• Proactively monitor application performance and flow health, identifying risks before they affect operations.
• Identify cost savings, such as right-sizing and licence optimisation.
• Assess legacy and redundant components for decommissioning and drive their retirement.

What you'll bring

• 5+ years of infrastructure architecture experience in enterprise environments.
• Broad knowledge of web application hosting: WebSphere, Kubernetes, Tomcat, IIS, HTTP servers.
• Broad knowledge of web security: ISVA, F5 WAF, API gateways, HSM, OAuth2, TLS.
• Experience in cloud environments.
• Solid technical depth in at least two of the areas above.
• Ability to understand banking business processes and assess business impact.
• Experience working in Agile delivery.
• Fluent English. French and/or Dutch is a strong plus.
• Master's degree or equivalent experience. TOGAF, ITIL or Agile certifications are an asset.
• Able to work hybrid from Brussels, full-time (40 hours per week).

You are

• Analytical, with strong synthesis skills.
• A clear communicator in writing and speech who can influence stakeholders.
• Proactive and autonomous, and comfortable working alone or in a team.
• Risk-aware and customer-oriented.
• At ease in a fast-paced, multicultural environment with demanding project schedules.