Role Summary
Lenovo seeks a Principal Architect to lead the architecture of Lenovo's platform capabilities into SAP's HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC 3.0) and Customer Data Center (CDC) program. This is a named-account lead architect role embedded with the SAP engagement, accountable for end-to-end design across compute, storage, network, disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and integration.
You will drive Lenovo's CDC capability roadmap from Planned and Partially Enabled status to Generally Available, working jointly with SAP engineering on shared capabilities and independently on Lenovo-owned items. The role sits within Lenovo's Hybrid Cloud Solutions & AI Offering Engineering (OA&E) organization. Deliverables are reference architectures, validated configurations, joint engineering artifacts, and operational runbooks consumed by Lenovo Professional Services and Managed Services.
Key Responsibilities
Architecture Design & Engineering
- Compute Architecture: Design Lenovo’s compute architecture for SAP PE CDC (Cloud Delivery Center), including virtual machine and bare-metal deployment patterns, hardware model selection, precise sizing guidance, and validated configurations.
- Storage Architecture: Define storage architecture across block and NFS tiers for both virtual and physical workloads; establish file system layouts, self-service provisioning patterns, and volume-to-bare-metal mappings in close partnership with SAP Storage Engineering.
- Network Architecture: Define comprehensive network architecture capabilities, covering core datacenter networking topologies, Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS), and network-layer micro-segmentation.
- Data Protection & Backup: Lead the architectural design for enterprise backup and data protection using Cohesity and/or Veeam, ensuring seamless integration across NFS and object storage tiers.
Resilience, High Availability & Disaster Recovery
- Data Center Topology: Lead data center topology design for complex single-site and dual-site deployments, establishing site-to-site replication parameters and seamless operational handoffs.
- Disaster Recovery (DR) Ownership: Own the end-to-end DR architecture for application environments, including NFS-based replication, cross-site DR testing, and strict RPO/RTO validation.
- High-Availability (HA) Validation: Define high-availability architectures for virtual and physical database tiers to target and sustain 99.9% availability, backed by rigorous, lab-based validation.
Joint Roadmap & Delivery Ownership
- Strategic Roadmap Execution: Drive Lenovo’s capability status from Planned and Not Enabled to Generally Available (GA) across the joint strategic roadmap, collaborating directly with SAP engineering on all shared deliverables.
- Technical Documentation & SOPs: Translate complex joint engineering decisions into production-ready reference architectures, validated configurations, comprehensive runbooks, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
Required Experience & Leadership
- 10+ years of enterprise experience in infrastructure and platform architecture for hosted, managed, or multi-tenant cloud environments, with a proven track record of end-to-end delivery ownership.
- Proven architectural leadership spanning core data center technologies across compute (virtualized and bare-metal environments), enterprise storage, and complex networking.
- Advanced VMware Architecture: Deep technical expertise designing, scaling, and managing enterprise-grade VMware environments, including vSphere/ESXi, vCenter Server, and advanced software-defined data center (SDDC) components.
- Advanced Disaster Recovery & High-Availability Design: Demonstrated expertise engineering resilient architectures utilizing synchronous/asynchronous replication, NFS replication, VMware high-availability configurations, and active-active stretched clusters (e.g., MetroCluster).
Networking & Storage Expertise
- Enterprise Networking: Hands-on experience designing and implementing network architectures utilizing Cisco or Arista switching, Palo Alto Networks firewalls, and modern overlay technologies like VXLAN.
- Enterprise Storage: Deep technical expertise in storage architecture design, specifically focused on NetApp platforms and block/file storage protocols (NFS, SMB, iSCSI/FC).
Core Professional Skills
- Stakeholder Management & Collaboration: Exceptional ability to influence and align cross-functional technical teams and business stakeholders across distributed, global time zones.
- Technical Documentation: Strong technical writing skills with a track record of producing clear, comprehensive architecture diagrams, design documents, and operational runbooks.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience designing and managing enterprise backup, recovery, and data protection architectures using Cohesity (highly preferred) or Veeam.
- Advanced VMware certifications (e.g., VCP or VCAP in Data Center Virtualization).
- Experience with NetApp MetroCluster deployments.
- Advanced Multi-Tenancy: Hands-on experience architecting and managing multi-tenant environments where strict customer segregation is enforced at the network layer.
- Compliance & Data Protection: Familiarity with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 security control frameworks as they apply to hosted platform environments.
- Enterprise Backup & Recovery: Experience designing enterprise backup and data protection architectures using Cohesity (highly preferred) or Veeam.
- Advanced VMware certifications (e.g., VCP or VCAP in Data Center Virtualization).
- Direct experience with NetApp MetroCluster deployments.
