Senior Infrastructure Architect

Senior Infrastructure Architect

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is hiring a Senior Infrastructure Architect within the Infrastructure and Operations team in the Information Technology and Services (ITS) unit.

Application deadline: Please note that the deadline for applications is 5 November 2026 at the end of day.

Please note that this role is offered as a 3-year fixed term contract.

This role is based in Basel, Switzerland; however, thanks to our status as an international organization, we can hire globally and welcome applications from candidates of all nationalities and located anywhere in the world. Relocation support is available for the successful candidate and their dependent family members.

Purpose of the job:

As a Senior Infrastructure Architect, you will lead the design and delivery of secure, scalable, and cost-efficient architecture across diverse infrastructure domains.

You will define target state architectures, establish reusable patterns, and provide governance and technical leadership to ensure alignment with business priorities, compliance, and resilience. At the same time, you will drive operational excellence by fostering collaboration, reducing complexity, and shaping roadmaps for sustainable and efficient infrastructure solutions.

This is a technical role to lead the end-to-end infrastructure architecture for complex, multi-domain initiatives across the organization.

By joining the Infrastructure and Operations team within the ITS unit, you will:

• Shape the future of infrastructure by delivering resilient, innovative, and business-aligned architecture across the organization.
• Join a collaborative team that supports the Bank’s ability to innovate and adapt to new technologies.
• Benefit from working in a unique, international environment that offers flexible, hybrid working options with a blend of onsite work from our central office location in Basel and home office.

Principal Accountabilities:

• Owns end-to-end infrastructure architecture for complex, multi-domain initiatives (e.g. compute, storage, networks, cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI)), defining reusable reference designs and patterns to meet availability, performance, scalability, and cost objectives. Reviews and approves infrastructure designs for conformance to non-functional requirements (e.g. throughput, latency, IOPS) while ensuring coherence across delivery teams and platforms.
• Authors and maintains infrastructure policies, standards, and reference architectures & roadmaps, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and advising on exceptions with clear justification. Acts as a key contributor in governance forums, promoting consistent application of standards and feeding lessons learned into continuous improvement of guardrails and patterns.
• Leads engagement with senior business and technology stakeholders to align infrastructure design with priorities, risk appetite, and non-functional requirements (e.g., SLAs, RPO/RTO, compliance).
• Translates stakeholder needs into architectural principles, guardrails, and prioritised backlogs to guide delivery.
• Defines secure-by-design and resilience patterns (e.g. segmentation, encryption, zero-trust) and validates disaster recovery and backup strategies through scenario-based testing. Partners with security, risk, and audit teams to evidence alignment with internal policies and applicable industry standards.
• Provides design authority across delivery teams, resolving cross-team design issues, approving low-level designs, and verifying implementations against architectural intent. Steers non-functional testing strategies (e.g., performance, failover, recovery) and ensures readiness criteria for go-live and operational acceptance.
• Leads evaluation and selection of infrastructure technologies, assessing enterprise-wide implications, vendor roadmaps, and EOL/EOS impacts while promoting open standards and APIs. Oversees proofs of concept, benchmarks, and rationalisation recommendations aligned with target roadmaps and integration strategies for shared platform services.
• Drives simplification through standardisation, consolidation, and decommissioning while embedding maintainability and operability criteria (e.g., SLOs, automation guardrails) into architectural artefacts.
• Maintains visibility of platform costs, collaborating with stakeholders to forecast and optimise spend while promoting modern platform capabilities to reduce total cost of ownership.
• Develops own capabilities by participating in assessment and development planning activities as well as formal and informal training and coaching; gains or maintains external professional accreditation, where relevant, to improve performance and fulfil personal potential. Maintains an in-depth understanding of technology, external regulation, and industry best practices through ongoing education, attending conferences, and reading specialist media.

Qualifications, skills and experience:

• Demonstrated expertise in designing and architecting hybrid infrastructure environments across on-premises data centers, private and public cloud, including compute, virtualization, containers, networks, storage and platforms
• Experience defining scalable, resilient and secure infrastructure architecture aligned to technology strategy
• Strong understanding of cloud-native and container platforms, including OpenShift and the architectural consideration for integrating containers, virtual machines within a modern hybrid infrastructure environment
• Strong understanding of Infrastructure automation and Infrastructure as Code, including principles, tooling and governance
• Ability to evaluate emerging technologies, products and architectural approaches, assessing their strategic relevance, maturity, risks and benefits and total cost of ownership and make recommendations to support technology decisions
• Ability to understand business context, requirements and architecture, as well as organizational structure, cultures, capabilities, and processes to document the current state of processes and the business
• Experienced to automate compliance tasks, maintain compliance, and generate reports for auditing purposes
• Experienced designing and integrating complex infrastructure platforms and services, ensuring interoperability, scalability and alignment with enterprise architecture and technology standards
• Experienced with business and stakeholder requirements translation into clear infrastructure architecture outcomes, balancing business priorities, technology strategy, risk, resilience, cost and operational requirements
• Strong communication with strong capability to deliver information in a clear, concise, and compelling manner to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior management
• Experience in designing infrastructures for AI use cases and emerging technologies
• Experience in banking or financial services in the context of infrastructures for business-critical applications and services – nice to have

Please note that the BIS's corporate language is English, which is used for all internal and external communication.

Who we are:

Internationalism is at the core of our identity and the best representation of this is our workforce. With employees from over 66 countries and offices in nine locations, the BIS is a global organisation with a truly international workforce. By joining us, you will work in a unique, highly rewarding, and international work environment. We are committed to equal opportunities at the BIS and aim to build a workforce that reflects our global membership. We strive to attract the best talent and foster an inclusive environment. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates, including those with a breadth of professional experience. You can discover more about our inclusive working environment here.

What the BIS offers:

We want your time at BIS to be a rewarding and career-enriching experience. We offer an agile and flexible working environment with hybrid working opportunities including home office and working from abroad days. To support our international applicants, we offer relocation support that extends to your dependent family members. In addition, we offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, including support for working families including childcare and education allowances (where applicable). Finally, we offer a genuinely unique international working environment, which will give you exposure to the global financial system and the opportunity to collaborate with passionate experts from all over the world.

Who we are

Internationalism is at the core of our identity and the best representation of this is our workforce. With employees from over 66 countries and offices in nine locations, the BIS is a global organisation with a truly international workforce. By joining us, you will work in a unique, highly rewarding, and international work environment. We are committed to equal opportunities at the BIS and aim to build a workforce that reflects our global membership. We strive to attract the best talent and foster an inclusive environment. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates, including those with a breadth of professional experience. You can discover more about our inclusive working environment here.