Data Center Network Architect

Work Arrangement: Hybrid, 3 days onsite / 2 days remote

Employment Type: Direct Hire

Our client is seeking an experienced Network Architect to lead the design and architecture of large-scale data center backbone networks, WAN connectivity, cloud interconnects, and customer peering environments supporting high-performance computing and AI infrastructure.

This role will be responsible for defining scalable, resilient, and secure network architectures that support high-bandwidth, low-latency workloads across data center, cloud, carrier, and customer environments.

The ideal candidate brings deep experience in data center networking, carrier-grade routing, peering ecosystems, traffic engineering, and multi-tenant network design
, along with the ability to develop architectural standards that support both current operations and long-term infrastructure growth.

• Own the architecture and evolution of large-scale data center backbone and data center interconnect (DCI) environments.
• Design highly available, scalable, and resilient network architectures supporting HPC, AI/ML, and other performance-intensive workloads.
• Develop and maintain reference architectures for WAN connectivity, carrier interconnects, cloud service provider connectivity, and backbone expansion.
• Define architectural standards for routing, traffic engineering, redundancy, failover, telemetry, and network observability.
• Design and optimize high-capacity connectivity between data centers, cloud platforms, carriers, customers, and external network providers.
• Develop secure multi-tenant networking architectures that provide customer isolation, predictable performance, and SLA adherence.
• Establish standards for peering, transit, interconnection, and network capacity management.
• Align backbone architecture with long-term capacity forecasts, infrastructure expansion, and business growth.
• Partner with Solutions Architects, platform teams, and infrastructure engineering teams to ensure network designs align with application and workload requirements.
• Ensure security, segmentation, compliance, monitoring, and operational visibility are embedded throughout the network architecture.
• Evaluate routing policies, traffic flows, bandwidth requirements, latency, and failure scenarios across large-scale distributed environments.
• Support capacity modeling, topology simulations, and digital twin initiatives for network planning and performance analysis.
• Evaluate emerging networking technologies and recommend solutions that improve scalability, resiliency, performance, and operational efficiency.
• Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance to engineering and operations teams responsible for implementing network designs.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Network Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• 7+ years of experience designing or architecting large-scale data center, backbone, service provider, or carrier networks.
• Deep expertise with modern data center networking architectures, including:
• EVPN
• VXLAN
• BGP
• Strong experience with WAN architecture, carrier connectivity, internet peering, transit, and interconnect strategies.
• Strong understanding of routing policy, traffic engineering, redundancy, failover, network convergence, and capacity planning.
• Experience designing highly available, high-bandwidth, low-latency network environments.
• Experience with multi-tenant network segmentation and secure customer connectivity.
• Strong understanding of network security, observability, telemetry, monitoring, and performance management.
• Experience supporting large-scale data center, hyperscale, HPC, or distributed infrastructure environments.
• Strong…