Principal Network Architect
Permanent
Hybrid/Manchester or London
Salary: London: £74,965 - £83,294 per annum and rest of UK: £67,436 - £74,929 per annum
Spinwell is recruiting for a Principal Network Architect for an excellent opportunity within the public sector.
RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE PRINCIPAL NETWORK ARCHITECT
Network Architecture Stewardship
- End‑To‑End technical leadership – Demonstrated ability to lead network services through design, delivery, operations, and issue resolution across production environments and third‑party providers.
- Define, own, and govern the End-to-End network architecture, spanning Access, Core, and Management and support platforms.
- Operate horizontally across domains relevant to network architecture. E.g. cloud, security, platforms, operations to ensure coherent end to end outcomes.
- Maintain authoritative current-state and target-state architectures, roadmaps, and principles.
- Safeguard the supportability, maintainability, and evolution of live network assets.
- Ensure architectural decisions preserve long-term service integrity and avoid unmanaged technical debt.
- Embed operational learning into architecture standards, design patterns, supplier obligations, and contracts.
Resilience, Availability & Risk Leadership
- Act as an E2E owner for network resilience strategy including high availability, redundancy, diversity, and failure domain isolation, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and graceful degradation.
- Lead proactive technology risk identification and mitigation, aligned to business risk appetite.
- Ensure resilience is designed in by default, not added retrospectively.
Supplier Technology Engagement
- Hold suppliers accountable for architectural compliance, asset transparency and configuration control, technical debt and lifecycle management.
- Influence supplier roadmaps to ensure Long-term supportability, Security by design, Value for money and regulatory alignment.
Governance and Regulatory Compliance
- Ensure network architectures comply with Licence and regulatory obligations, security standards (e.g. ISO 27001) and Smart Energy Code (SEC) obligations.
- Embed architectural governance consistently across delivery and operations.
- Improve auditability, traceability, and design decision transparency.
Influence & Architectural Maturity
- Provide guidance to Domain and Solution Architects
- Raise architectural maturity, consistency, and decision quality across the Technology Office.
Strategy, Investment & Future Readiness
- Define and evolve the long-term network architecture strategy aligned to the DCC corporate and Technology Office objectives.
- Provide architectural input to business cases, investment proposals, technology refresh, and transformation initiatives.
- Monitor external trends, standards, and regulatory change to inform network evolution.
- Champion continuous improvement and learning within the architecture community.
SKILLS/EXPERIENCE OF THE PRINCIPAL NETWORK ARCHITECT
- End-to-End network design and Architecture – Proven experience on network design and operational optimisation, evolution of architecture including Core and Access Networks.
- Experience in 3GPP standard Radio and Core network for 2G/3G, 4G, 5G, non-terrestrial and IoT connectivity models, networking protocols and SD-WAN architecture and implementation.
- Systems Integration – Proficient in integrating diverse systems using APIs, middleware, messaging, and data transformation patterns across cloud and on-premises platforms.
- Cloud and Modern Infrastructure Architecture – Skilled in solutions hosted on public cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP), including use of containers, serverless, and hybrid cloud strategies, operation, and optimisation.
- Enterprise WAN & SD‑WAN architecture – Proven expertise designing and delivering resilient, high‑performance WAN solutions, including SD‑WAN across MPLS and hybrid networks.
- Network security & traffic management – Strong experience with enterprise security controls, traffic inspection, encryption, and application delivery platforms in complex environments.
- Cloud & on‑prem connectivity – Deep experience designing secure, scalable connectivity between on‑prem data centres and public cloud platforms (Azure and AWS).
- Core networking & modern infrastructure – Expert knowledge of IP networking, routing, and modern architectures including virtualised, software‑defined, and hardware‑based platforms.
- Architecture Economics & Cost Modelling – Proven experience in cost modelling, understanding cost drivers at scale, supplier commercial models and driving cost efficiency initiative.
If you are a Principal Network Architect, apply now or send your CV to Spinwell!
We welcome all applications regardless of background, in line with our commitment to diversity, equality and inclusion.
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