Cloud Solutions Architect
Organizational Context
The Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), part of the UN Secretariat, operates under the UN Economic and Social Council. It comprises 21 Arab countries, serving as a policy harmonization framework and knowledge hub. This role is within the Decision-Support and Data Science Division (DSDSD), which drives modernization and innovation through advanced analytics and secure digital platforms, supporting ESCWA, UN entities, and Member States.
Job Purpose
This consultant role supports ESCWA's migration of core application workloads to Microsoft Azure. The primary purpose is to provide architectural analysis, cost-optimization assessment, and technical solution design. The consultant will collaborate with development and infrastructure teams to audit existing on-premises applications, analyze resource utilization, and design tailored Azure cloud architectures. This includes evaluating IaaS vs. PaaS options and developing migration strategies. The goal is to ensure efficient, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions, delivering actionable designs and specifications for the internal teams to implement, thereby enhancing evidence-based decision-making and organizational efficiency across the region.
Responsibilities
Key responsibilities include auditing on-premises applications hosted on Proxmox virtual machines and gathering technical deployment requirements. Analyze resource utilization, compute demands, memory allocations, and architectural dependencies of VMs to establish baseline performance metrics. Design tailored Azure cloud architecture topologies and migration runbooks. Evaluate and recommend IaaS virtual machines or cloud-native Azure PaaS services for application migration. Formulate step-by-step migration technical blueprints and sequence plans. Conduct cost-benefit analyses comparing on-premises costs with Azure pricing and provide recommendations for right-sizing Azure resources. Offer technical guidance on optimal Azure deployment pathways, identity management, access controls, operational best practices, security baselines, and performance monitoring strategies.
Work Experience
A minimum of 4 years of professional experience in cloud systems architecture, IT infrastructure analysis, or enterprise cloud solutions design is required. Demonstrated experience with Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure solutions is essential. Experience migrating workloads from on-premises hypervisors (Proxmox VE or VMware) to Microsoft Azure is highly desirable.
Skills
Cloud systems architecture, IT infrastructure analysis, enterprise cloud solutions design, Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure, IaaS vs. PaaS evaluation, cloud cost optimization, resource right-sizing, workload migration strategy, Proxmox VE, VMware, Azure AD/Entra ID, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics.