Senior Network Architect (On-prem & Cloud)

Overview:  
The Senior Network Architect is a senior technical leader responsible for driving innovation, shaping technology strategy, and managing complex engineering projects. This role requires deep expertise in cloud architecture, on-premises data centers, infrastructure design, and cloud networking across multiple platforms. The ideal candidate will lead the transformation from on-premises to cloud infrastructure, providing strategic direction, technical guidance, and ensuring seamless coexistence during the migration. 

Duties and Responsibilities: 

• Define and drive the networking strategy for enterprise cloud infrastructure, ensuring service reliability, sustainability, and efficiency are prioritized. 

• Design and ensure compliance with governance, standards, and best practices for cloud platforms, focusing on meeting non-functional requirements such as availability, performance, security, maintainability, and cost-efficiency. 

• Participate in cross-functional teams to implement complex cloud projects, serving as the lead architect for the networking team and ensuring solutions align with best practices for networking, security, and automation within the networking domain. 

• Provide mentorship, technical guidance, and coaching to engineering and networking teams, emphasizing service reliability, efficiency, and a solid understanding of core networking principles. 

• Act as the lead architect for both on-premise and cloud infrastructure, ensuring comprehensive understanding and proper connectivity between environments. 

• Drive the migration strategy for on-premise infrastructure to cloud platforms, ensuring a well-architected and operationalized transition plan. 

• Operationalize and maintain cloud infrastructure alongside on-premise systems during the transition, ensuring both environments coexist effectively for an extended period. 

• Serve as a top-tier escalation point for major outages or disruptions, helping to quickly identify and resolve networking and infrastructure issues. 

• Provide leadership and guidance for the team during complex projects, assisting with challenging technical issues and ensuring best practices are followed. 

• Evaluate emerging technologies and trends to drive continuous improvement, especially in areas such as hybrid infrastructure management, cloud networking, secure configuration management, and disaster recovery planning. 

• Ensure robust connectivity management, including VPNs, circuits, cross-site connections, and the implementation of Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA), to support high availability, secure access, and reliable performance. 

• Collaborate with third-party vendors, ISPs, and service providers to manage network products, contracts, and infrastructure procurement. 

• Oversee infrastructure right-sizing, data center optimization, and disaster recovery planning to ensure resilient operations. 

• Lead efforts in network automation and orchestration, leveraging tools such as Ansible or Terraform to automate configurations and enhance efficiency. 

• Configure and manage advanced network technologies, including routing protocols such as BGP, OSPF, and MPLS, as well as managing firewall and load balancing policies. 

• Document network architecture, configuration standards, and ensure knowledge sharing across the team to maintain consistent practices. 

• Provide input to senior leadership regarding network architecture and strategic initiatives, ensuring alignment with overall business goals. 

• Serve as a team lead, providing leadership, strategic direction, and fostering a collaborative environment that supports the engineering team during the cloud transformation. 

Job Requirements: 

• Minimum of 10+ years of experience in cloud engineering, systems engineering, or a related field. 

• Expert knowledge of cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, with hands-on experience in infrastructure management. 

• Strong understanding of networking concepts, including VPNs, firewalls, DNS, load balancing, advanced routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, MPLS), and cloud connectivity. 

• Preferred experience with Aviatrix for managing multi-cloud connectivity and optimizing cross-cloud networking. 

• Proven track record of leading large-scale cloud transformation projects, including on-premise to cloud migrations. 

• Experience with systems administration, infrastructure configuration management, network automation tools, and troubleshooting across both on-prem and cloud environments. 

• Strong leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills. 

• Advanced problem-solving abilities and ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment. 

• Experience in evaluating, designing, developing, and building proof-of-concept (PoC) and architecting infrastructure solutions. 

• Knowledge of disaster recovery planning, business continuity, and performance optimization in network environments. 

• Experience with network automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or similar. 

Education: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Network Engineering, Information Technology or Computer Engineering

Physical Demands and Work Environment: 

• Sedentary work (i.e., sitting for long periods of time). 

• Exerting up to 10 pounds of force occasionally and/or negligible amount of force. 

• Frequently or constantly required to lift, carry, push, pull or otherwise move objects and perform repetitive motions. 

• Subject to inside environmental conditions. 

• Travel for this position may exceed 5%, including travel to data centers and office locations for physical networking, maintenance tasks, architecture planning, and supporting cloud transformation initiatives as necessary.