Network Architect

Role: Network Architect

Duration: 31/03/2025 - 5 Months - Potential for Extension

Location: MoD Corsham - Hybrid - 3 Days per Week Onsite

Rate: 950 P/Day - Inside IR35

The OpNET Design Office is responsible for the coherence and assurance of the design activity for the entirety of the OpNet Platform. This role reports directly to the Design Office Lead under governance of the System Design Authority & Core Product Owner. The primary focus of this role is to create, advise and assure OpNet designs for networking & connectivity technology adoption. They must be conformant with vendor best practice, MoD security enforcement and the Defence Digital architectural patterns and guidance.

Responsibilities:

Support

Act as the point of contact for network architecture and design on behalf of the Design Office Lead.

Interact with programme, project and engineering team leads to ensure cross team, cross technology coherence to satisfy the networking requirements of the OpNet system.

Support design vision creation, design decisions and design review as part of the end-to-end assurance process.

Support to Programme and Project Stakeholder engagement and RAIDO

Liaise with external (to NSoIT(D)) stakeholders to ensure end-to-end designs are being delivered across the wider Defence landscape.

Liaise with team leads across the NSoIT(D) Programme and wider defence digital organisations to ensure a robust solution is delivered within Time, Cost and Performance.

Design

Identify, create and communicate HLDs across programme teams and the Design Office

Support the review of all high and low-level designs for coherence, technical content and quality.

Participate in Preliminary and Critical Design Reviews with stakeholders, both presenting and challenging design decisions, requirements alignment and supportability aspects.

Align standards, frameworks and security with overall business and technology strategy.

Support to the design of platform architecture elements to enable the system to function as part of the wider defence estate, during inception, transition and operations.

Assure

Ensuring that standards, frameworks and security postures align with overall business and technology strategies and policies e.g. Secure by Design, Defence as a Platform, Federated Mission Networking and JSPs.

Identify capability gaps in existing architectures and recommend changes or enhancements in line with Agile and continuous improvement methods.

A minimum of 10 years demonstrable experience in the following:

• Architecture and development of secure networking solutions with successful delivery on complex, large scale programmes utilising industry standard & emerging technologies where possible.
• A deep understanding of networking, including Cisco Routing & Switching, DMVPN, IPSEC, MPLS L2 & L3, and VMware NSX (T or v4.0.0 onwards), is crucial.
• Proven demonstrable experience and proficiency in designing and architecting complex systems, with a focus on virtualization using Cisco & VMware solutions.
• Knowledge and understanding of JSP and over-arching HMG policy (Secure by Design).
• Writing technical requirements and producing detailed solution architectures.
• Designing and implementing secure networking solutions using VMware NSX for network virtualization, macro and micro-segmentation. This includes continuous monitoring of technology updates and proposing improvements and updates to an operational system.
• Consulting and engineering in the development and design of networking best practices and implementation of solid security principles across the project to meet business goals along with customer and regulatory requirements.
• Rationalising network designs & their alignment against architectural best practice.

Demonstrable experience in the following:

• Hierarchical IP Subnetting.
• In-depth understanding of routing protocols, internal and external, OSPF, and BGP.
• Experience with SD-WAN solutions
• Experience in integrating Cisco & VMware NSX solutions with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance standards related to networking environments.
• Knowledge or experience in Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Ability to optimize networking solutions for maximum performance and resource utilization especially in very bandwidth, power, and size/weight constrained environments.

An understanding of Defence Lines of Development and MOD Capability Integration.

Comprehensive knowledge of UK Defence deployed network architectures, federations with coalition partners, security enforcing gateways and modern techniques for enforcement of security principles including VPN, VDI, hardware encryption and information flow handling.

Experience in reviewing engineering designs and enhancing solutions against business requirements and Industry Best Practices.

Experience in delivering to a least privilege security model leveraging RBAC, Zero Trust and Data Centric security models.

At least one of the following professional certifications that have been obtained within the last five years:

Cisco CCIE, Cisco CCDP, Cisco CCNP, VMware VCP-NV (VMware vCenter Certified Professional - Network Virtualisation), VCP-DCV (VCP - Data Centre Virtualisation), VMware Certified Design eXpert (VCDX)

Desirable Skills and Experience:

• Networking certification, CCDP (Cisco Certified Design Professional) or similar.
• Networking certification, CCNP (Cisco Certified Networking Professional).
• Design and configuration of Wide Area Networks, high grade encryption and DSCP traffic management.
• Military Information Services such as NATO FAS, UK Base Services and MOD Business management apps.
• Automation and Orchestration technologies and principals.
• Security implementations such as PKI and proxy services in line with MOD Security assurance processes.
• Delivering in Agile and Waterfall project management environments
• Experience with the Atlassian Toolset - JIRA, Confluence and BitBucket for delivering Agile based projects.

Optional Skills:

• A Computer Science university-based education at Bachelors or Masters level.
• Previous work in delivery of automation-based programmes and projects