Principal Infrastructure Architect

ISO New England Inc.•Holyoke, MA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

ISO New England is the independent system operator responsible for ensuring the safe and reliable flow of electricity in our region and planning for the future of the electric grid. We are at the forefront of New England’s ongoing transition to clean energy. The Principal Infrastructure Architect is a technical leader responsible for defining and evolving ISO New England's enterprise infrastructure architecture. This role drives long-term strategy across cloud, hybrid, compute, storage, virtualization, reliability, observability, and performance, ensuring highly resilient, scalable, and mission-critical systems. Partnering with Enterprise Architecture, Network Architecture, Security, Infrastructure Engineering, Site Reliability, and business leaders, this role ensures infrastructure designs anticipate future needs, embed security by design, and support the reliability of the New England electric grid, wholesale markets, and internal IT services. The ideal candidate will have a breadth of experience across infrastructure domains with deep expertise in one or two areas. Flexibility, range, and the ability to thrive in a heavily regulated environment matter more than mastery of any single technology stack.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Security, or related field
10+ years’ experience with enterprise infrastructure technologies
5+ years in infrastructure or platform architecture roles
Track record of building and operating infrastructure before moving into pure architecture work
Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation (Terraform, Ansible, GitOps)
Breadth across cloud, hybrid, compute, storage, and virtualization, with deep expertise in at least one or two areas
Strong understanding of reliability engineering, capacity planning, and performance engineering
Proven ability to lead complex initiatives and collaborate across teams

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree in a technical field
Certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect (Professional), VCDX, CKA, Microsoft Enterprise, Terraform/Ansible
Experience working in heavily regulated or audited environments (NERC CIP, SOC, FedRAMP, PCI, HIPAA, or similar) where change control, documentation, and process rigor are non-negotiable

Responsibilities

Own the 3–5 year infrastructure architecture roadmap, including technology lifecycles and technical debt reduction
Influence infrastructure strategy supporting grid operations, markets, and enterprise IT
Align infrastructure architecture with modern reliability, performance, and observability practices
Design and evolve enterprise infrastructure platforms across cloud, hybrid, compute, storage, and virtualization
Evaluate existing solutions for architectural integrity, scalability, and alignment with security standards
Define standardized architecture patterns and reusable components to accelerate adoption
Architect for high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), automated failover, and resilience
Embed observability, telemetry, and capacity planning into all designs
Support complex incident response and ensure lessons learned inform future architecture
Partner with Enterprise Architecture, the Principal Network Architect, and Security to ensure cross-domain alignment
Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and implementation guidance to engineers and architects across the organization
Participate in architecture reviews, governance forums, and post-incident retrospectives
Champion SRS reliability, observability, and performance standards