Cloud Portfolio Architect

Role Overview

The Cloud Portfolio Architect owns the enterprise grade Cloud strategy, architecture, and infrastructure for projects across Irish Life Group.

The successful candidate will advise on cloud adoption, migration, and optimisation to ensure alignment with the Cloud Strategic Roadmap. They will be expected to conform to the approved methodologies and standards in Delivering cloud architecture and infrastructure solutions compliant with Enterprise Architecture direction. The successful candidate will work within the working within the GACS (Cloud Enablement & Delivery) team and in partnership with their fellow Portfolio Architects, Solution Architects, Engineering, Risk, Data, European governance bodies, and business stakeholders to define, develop and execute the Cloud Roadmap for Customer Solutions/Irish Life Group.

The Role

As a Cloud Portfolio Architect, you will:

Strategic Leadership & Direction

• Define and champion the long-term strategic vision for Cloud within Customer Solutions and across ILG.
• Oversee the entire Cloud ecosystem for Irish Life Group and enable the business to drive the strategic direction.
• Develop and maintain an enterprise-aligned roadmap for safe, scalable Cloud solutions.
• Shape long-term capability development across Cloud platforms, lifecycle maturity, governance, and engineering.
• Advise senior leaders on Cloud decisions, platform evolution, and capital planning.
• Identify strategic Cloud opportunities and threats, informing organisational direction and risk posture.
• Design Cloud-first architectures for Irish Life Group initiatives.
  
  Define & Evolve Cloud Architecture

• Define and continuously enhance enterprise Cloud architecture, reference patterns, and guardrails.
• Translate Cloud governance requirements — including GDPR, DORA, Irish regulatory guidance, and ILG governance rules — into actionable architectural controls and technical standards.
• Ensure the architecture supports transparency, safety, explainability, auditability, and alignment with ILG’s enterprise architecture direction.

Embed Cloud Governance & Regulatory Compliance

• Implement governance frameworks defined at a European and ILG enterprise level.
• Provide technical risk assessments, architectural artefacts, and evidence packs in support of regulatory or audit reviews.
• Ensure Cloud solutions are designed to meet European governance expectations and support escalations to EU Governing Committees where required.
• Implement robust risk management practices by identifying potential technical risks and architectural challenges within the Irish Life Group Cloud domain, and by proposing mitigation strategies to ensure system stability, scalability, and optimal performance.

Shape the Cloud Use Case Portfolio

• Partner with Product and Portfolio leadership to shape a prioritised Cloud opportunity pipeline.
• Assess technical feasibility, architectural risk, governance implications, and regulatory classification early in the use case lifecycle.
• Provide architectural leadership across discovery, design, delivery, and operationalisation.

Delivery, Governance Forums & Collaboration

Lead Architecture of Azure & Cloud Native Solutions

• Develop the ILG Cloud roadmap, outlining future strategic directions aligned with the business strategy.
• Provide leadership and direction to the GACS team as well as supporting business teams.
• Lead the design of Azure and related cloud-native solutions, ensuring scalability, robustness, performance, and compliance with ILG security and risk standards.
• Foster proactive stakeholder engagement by routinely liaising with business leaders, vendors, and fellow architects to understand business needs and clearly communicate the technical possibilities and limitations within the Customer Solutions and Irish Life Group frameworks.

Contribute to Governance Forums

• Be a standing member of the Customer Solutions Design Authority (CSDA) and represent the portfolio in the Irish Life Group Enterprise Architecture Board & Forum, ensuring decisions align to ILG and enterprise frameworks.
• Represent Cloud portfolio interests at ILG Architecture & Governance Boards, working closely with the Head of Strategy & Architecture, Risk Leads, and the wider ILG community.
• Ensure all Cloud designs meet ILG enterprise architecture principles, security requirements, and regulatory obligations.
• Be an integral member of the Irish Life Group Architecture Community, working closely with peers across the Irish Life Group and engaging with the ILG Head of Strategy & Architecture to ensure alignment of architectural principles and strategic direction.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with the Risk, Legal, Data, Engineering, and operational teams to ensure safe and compliant delivery of Cloud.
• Translate complex regulatory and technical requirements into clear, business-friendly guidance.
• Support the uplift of Cloud literacy, governance capability, and good architectural practice across ILG.
• Represent GACS in key discussions within Irish Life and, as opportunities arise, engage at European and global levels.
• Exercise commercial awareness by design, ensuring that all team members are driven by business value and fully consider the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in all design decisions.

Continuous Improvement & Innovation

• Stay ahead of emerging Cloud regulations, industry standards, and architectural innovations to optimally leverage new and existing technology for the business.
• Identify opportunities to improve Cloud governance maturity, technical accelerators, reusable patterns, and documentation.
• Drive responsible, ethical, and forward-thinking adoption of Cloud across Irish Life Group.

What you will help us to achieve

• Excellent collaboration skills, essential for working within your team and engaging with peers across the IS organisation.
• Ability to influence and provide effective support to Senior IS and Business leaders, ensuring Cloud First initiatives align with strategic objectives within Irish Life and across the wider group.
• Proficient in partnering with senior management both within Irish Life and across the wider group, enabling the organisation to make informed investment decisions related to Cloud environments, capabilities, and automation opportunities.
• Proven track record of delivering high‑quality, complex Cloud solutions within a large enterprise environment, including large scale transformations to Cloud.
• Good knowledge of Application Engineering, and Agile delivery practices, services are robust, scalable, and continuously improved.
• Capable of producing high‑quality architectural and design documentation, including Cloud reference architectures, data flow models, and Cloud governance artefacts, along with delivering insightful presentations to senior management and project teams.
• Excellent problem‑solving and decision‑making abilities, with an aptitude for assessing risks, technical trade‑offs, and other considerations.
• Experience in designing Cloud solutions that drive business value and address complex issues.
• Significant experience with integration patterns, security best practices, and applications development environments.
• Versatile experience working with various deployment models, including on‑Premise, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, and Public Cloud services, ensuring seamless alignment across the organisation’s technology estate.
• Knowledge of microservices architecture and containerisation (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience with the Microsoft AI ecosystem, including Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Services, Fabric, and the Power Platform, enabling enterprise‑grade AI workloads and business‑led innovation.
• Experience writing scripts and automation workflows using Powershell, Swagger or similar languages, including integration with APIs, and DevOps tooling.
• Understanding of networking concepts, including DNS, load balancing, and firewalls.
• Skilled in aligning non‑functional requirements of Cloud solutions—including interpretability, performance, latency, scalability, and cost—with the organisation’s business strategy and risk appetite.
• Strong understanding of emerging Cloud regulations with the ability to interpret legal and regulatory text and translate it into practical technical and architectural requirements for Cloud systems.
• Ability to embed regulatory compliance into architecture and delivery, ensuring that Cloud solutions meet mandatory logging, monitoring, robustness, and documentation requirements and that teams understand their responsibilities.

Essential Requirements

• Minimum of 7 years of experience in technical design of strategic solutions, including exposure to enterprise‑scale platforms, automation frameworks, and modern architectures.
• Strong understanding of modern integration and orchestration services, such as Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Services, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and enterprise API layers that support intelligent workflows as well as Azure Front Door and APIM
• Advanced knowledge of Cloud automation, cloud infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, automated deployment strategies, and Cloud risk management controls, ensuring responsible and consistent rollout of Cloud capabilities across environments.
• Experience of security, scalability, observability, and performance optimisation, with the ability to evaluate performance, and architectural trade‑offs in highly regulated environments.
• Strong understanding of best practices in Enterprise Architecture, with the ability to embed Cloud-specific governance standards, architectural patterns, and compliance requirements across the organisation.
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies and collaborative team practices, particularly within cross‑functional teams involving engineers, product owners, and business stakeholders.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, necessary for articulating complex ideas and demystifying technology and systems.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Governance teams to ensure enterprise‑wide alignment on regulatory obligations and to support audits, conformity assessments, and regulatory reporting where required
• Sound understanding of current Application, Infrastructure, and Security Frameworks.

Desirable Skills

• A deep understanding of Microsoft Azure technologies with the technical capability and experience to learn new technologies and understand relevant cloud trends.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services.
• Experience working in the financial services sector, preferably in life assurance, where Cloud governance, ethical considerations, and compliance requirements carry heightened significance.
• Hold certification(s) in relevant cloud architecture domains, such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure Engineer Associate.
• Knowledge of Regulatory requirements (GDPR etc) including implementation patterns, best practice approaches for technical documentation, risk management systems, post market monitoring, and human oversight design.