Senior Network Architect

📋 Description

• • Lead the end-to-end network architecture for large, complex customer environments, encompassing multi-site, hybrid, multi-cloud, and regulated ecosystems. This involves driving architecture discovery through comprehensive current-state assessments, detailed application dependency mapping, thorough traffic flow analysis, meticulous capacity baselining, and rigorous risk evaluation.
• • Develop and deliver high-quality architectural deliverables, including detailed High-Level and Low-Level Designs (HLD/LLD), establishing reference architectures and reusable design patterns, creating logical and physical diagrams, defining robust segmentation strategies and routing/switching frameworks, architecting comprehensive security and resiliency solutions (fault domains, high availability, disaster recovery), and producing accurate bills of materials, licensing alignment, and cost/risk trade-off analyses.
• • Define and validate future-state architectures across a broad spectrum of environments, including data center, campus, WAN, and branch locations. This includes expertise in SD-WAN, SASE, and ZTNA integrations, load balancing (L4/L7), DNS/DHCP/IPAM (DDI), NAC, segmentation, and micro-segmentation where applicable, as well as IPv4/IPv6 strategy, BGP/OSPF/ISIS, and EVPN/VXLAN when required.
• • Ensure all network designs are meticulously aligned with overarching business objectives, such as supporting growth initiatives, integrating M&A activity, ensuring regulatory compliance, facilitating cloud adoption, enhancing user experience, and driving cost optimization.
• • Maintain hands-on credibility and validate designs through practical application, including configuration prototypes, rigorous lab testing, detailed packet captures, and effective live-environment troubleshooting.
• • Lead initiatives to significantly stabilize and mature network operations by implementing standardized operating procedures, comprehensive runbooks, and clearly defined escalation paths. Drive incident reduction programs through diligent root cause analysis (RCA) and structured problem management.
• • Implement formal change governance with standardized templates, robust risk scoring, and well-defined rollback strategies. Focus on configuration standardization through golden configurations, compliance validation, and drift detection mechanisms.
• • Enhance network resiliency by eliminating single points of failure (SPOFs), validating high availability (HA) consistency, and conducting thorough failover testing.
• • Develop and execute a proactive Network Reliability Plan with measurable outcomes, aiming for improved availability, reduced downtime, decreased Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), lower change failure rates, significant alert noise reduction, and the establishment of performance Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for latency, jitter, and packet loss that align with critical application requirements.
• • Establish strong Day-2 operational readiness by implementing comprehensive monitoring and telemetry baselines (SNMP, streaming telemetry, syslog, NetFlow), effective event correlation and service mapping, and proactive capacity forecasting and lifecycle management.
• • Drive post-implementation validation through rigorous performance testing, failover validation, and the establishment of formal operational acceptance criteria.
• • Serve as a trusted technical advisor to executive stakeholders, including CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and VPs of Infrastructure/Operations. Lead executive workshops, effectively translating complex technical strategies into tangible business outcomes, covering risk posture, resiliency strategy, compliance readiness, CapEx/OpEx optimization, vendor strategy, and cloud and network roadmap alignment.
• • Present architectural decisions with clearly articulated trade-offs, including option comparisons (cost, risk, complexity, time-to-value), explicit assumptions and constraints, and clear, defensible recommendations.
• • Own the technical narrative in high-impact forums such as Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), Executive Business Reviews (EBRs), steering committees, architecture review boards, and executive incident briefings.
• • Provide essential architectural governance throughout the entire delivery lifecycle. This includes reviewing designs for accuracy, scalability, security, and operational readiness, ensuring implementation fidelity to architectural intent, and leading critical technical checkpoints like design reviews, pre-change readiness assessments, and go/no-go decisions.
• • Define and enforce stringent quality standards for implementation best practices, validation checklists, documentation completeness, operational handoff procedures, and functional, performance, and failover testing.
• • Partner closely with Program Managers and Delivery Leads on scope definition, sequencing, dependency management, risk mitigation, and cutover strategy planning.
• • Act as the highest-level escalation point for complex network issues, including routing instability, BGP/OSPF anomalies, asymmetry, STP/loop conditions, MTU/fragmentation challenges, application timeouts, TLS impacts, WAN/ISP/cloud edge packet loss and jitter root cause analysis, and firewall/NAT conflicts and segmentation misalignment.
• • Lead major incident bridge calls, coordinating cross-functional teams comprising network, security, compute, storage, applications, ISPs, and cloud providers. Apply evidence-based troubleshooting using packet captures, flow analytics, logs, telemetry, traceroutes, and synthetic testing. Translate deep technical findings into concise, executive-ready summaries.
• • Embed security deeply into architecture and operational practices through segmentation and least-privilege connectivity models, secure management plane architecture (MFA, AAA, TACACS/RADIUS), and robust logging, auditability, and compliance alignment.
• • Design network solutions in accordance with applicable frameworks such as Zero Trust principles and regulatory control models (PCI, HIPAA, SOX, FedRAMP-like requirements). Ensure secure remote access and third-party connectivity architectures.
• • Drive enterprise-wide network engineering standards, including architecture standards, naming conventions, IP schema governance, BGP community design, QoS strategy, and lifecycle management including EOL/EOS tracking and refresh planning.
• • Promote automation and operational efficiency through Infrastructure as Code (Ansible, Terraform) where appropriate, configuration templates and compliance guardrails, and repeatable, automated deployment pipelines.
• • Mentor senior engineers and architects to elevate architectural quality and consistency. Lead communities of practice and provide technical enablement, training, and reusable design frameworks. Set technical direction across multiple programs and internal initiatives. Influence stakeholders across sales, delivery, and operations, driving alignment without formal authority.