Principal Infrastructure Architect

ABOUT CINCOM

Cincom builds and supports enterprise software used by organisations globally, with three main product lines CPQ, Eloquence and Smalltalk. Our customers run our products on their own provided infrastructure and, increasingly, hosted and managed by Cincom in the cloud. We are reorganising engineering, delivery and support so customers get one consistent, well-run service whatever they buy and however it is deployed.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

Our product engineering teams own how our software is built. We need one owner who works with the product teams to determine what it runs on, specifically, the infrastructure and deployment design for every product, whether Cincom hosts it in the cloud or the customer runs it on their own hardware.

When a customer or colleague asks what hardware or cloud capacity a deployment needs for a given volume, how it should be laid out, or what it will cost to run, the Principal Infrastructure Architect provides the answer or options and stands behind it.

This is a hands-on role: you will design configurations, build them, test them with the product teams, and get into the detail when things go wrong.

HOW THE ROLE WORKS

A few points to be clear on:

• You own infrastructure and deployment design, not software design. Application architecture stays with the individual product engineering teams; you work with them to understand how each product behaves under load and what it needs from the infrastructure.
• You cover both Cincom-hosted and customer on-premise deployments. Hosting operations (patching, backups, monitoring, incidents) sit in Support with the Hosting Engineers, who build to your designs.
• You set the direction for our cloud infrastructure and its commercials. Day-to-day subscription and cost management sits with the Hosting Engineers; you own the strategy, the provider relationship and the cost model behind our hosted pricing.
• You work alongside our Principal AI Architect on the infrastructure our AI services need, including hardware for models we host locally as well as cloud capacity.
• You support Sales, Pre-Sales and Client Success on key deals and accounts, so customers get one credible answer from Cincom on how to deploy and size our products.
• You will create and maintain a standard, simple to use, sizing guide/calculator, to be used for all “standard” deployment requests

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Infrastructure and deployment design

• Define and maintain reference deployment designs for each product, for cloud-hosted and on-premise: including servers/VMs, storage, networking, virtualisation, containers and databases.
• Design for availability and resilience: high availability, load balancing, failover and disaster recovery.
• Review and sign off infrastructure design for each customer deployment and any significant change to it.
• Own the design of our Kubernetes and container platform and decide where containerised deployment fits and where it does not.

Sizing and performance

• Build and own an infrastructure sizing model for each product, starting with Eloquence and CPQ, that turns customer volumes and workload mix, online, batch and on-demand use for Eloquence and Model execution, quotation production and Analytics for CPQ, into the hardware or cloud capacity needed.
• Own repeatable performance tests of deployment configurations with each product team and use the results to validate and improve the sizing models.
• Turn the models into clear sizing guidance that Sales, Delivery and customers can use with confidence.
• Investigate infrastructure-related performance problems in live customer environments when escalated.

Cloud infrastructure and commercials

• Set our cloud infrastructure strategy, with Azure as today’s primary platform and managing any migration from Enavate hosting to Azure
• Own the relationship with our cloud providers and lead negotiations on commitments and reserved capacity with key stakeholders.
• Build the cost-to-serve model for hosted customers, so we price hosting and volume-based licensing on real numbers.
• Specify hardware and capacity for any infrastructure Cincom runs itself, including for locally hosted AI models.

Customers and pre-sales

• Act as the senior voice with key customers and prospects on infrastructure, sizing, resilience and deployment choices.
• Support RFIs, RFPs and security questionnaires with accurate, reusable infrastructure content.

Process and compliance

• Work with our process and compliance lead so our infrastructure and deployment designs support ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification in 2027 and our obligations under the EU Cyber Resilience Act.
• Help build the Drata knowledge base for responses to compliance and security questionnaires