Senior Network Architect

Job Profile Summary

Responsible for the strategic architecture, design, and technical direction of Rackspace’s global data center and wide area network (WAN) infrastructure, with a primary focus on healthcare customer environments. Serves as the senior technical authority for data center fabric and WAN transport, including the high-bandwidth, low-latency network underlay required to support high-performance compute (HPC) and other data-intensive workloads. Translates healthcare business, clinical, and regulatory requirements into scalable, resilient, and secure network architectures. Acts as a liaison with vendors and third-party providers and partners closely with engineering, security, and customer teams to guide the network’s strategic direction across highly available, compliance-driven healthcare infrastructure. This is a network architecture role focused on the connectivity fabric that delivers bandwidth and throughput to compute and storage platforms, not on designing or administering the HPC compute clusters themselves.

Location: US Remote - Work from Home with up to 25% Travel

Career Level Summary

• Recognized as an expert within the company and requires in-depth and/or breadth of expertise in own job discipline and broad knowledge of other job disciplines within the organization function
• Solves unique, high-impact problems that affect multiple teams, products, or customers
• Contributes to the development of organizational sub-function strategy, including data center and WAN roadmaps
• Works independently, with guidance sought only in the most complex or novel situations
• Progression to this level is typically restricted on the basis of business requirements

Critical Competencies

• Excellence: Exceeds expectations by consistently demonstrating accountability, discipline, high performance, and a proven track record of exceptional results.
• Customer-driven: Prioritizes customer needs and satisfaction through collaborative and proactive problem-solving, and an unwavering commitment to customer success.
• Expertise: Possesses deep understanding of customer needs and continually grows and enhances skills to provide customer-focused solutions.
• Agility: Quickly adapts and responds to dynamic customer needs and expectations through innovative solutions.
• Compassion: Cultivates a positive and supportive environment to effectively work together towards a common goal, fostering trust within Rackspace and with external stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Owns end-to-end architecture of the global data center fabric, including spine-leaf and Clos-based designs, EVPN/VXLAN overlay, and high-density, low-latency topologies that support both enterprise and HPC workloads

• Architects and evolves the enterprise WAN, including MPLS, SD-WAN, dark fiber, and DWDM transport, to deliver resilient, low-latency connectivity between data centers, campuses, and cloud on-ramps

• Architects high-bandwidth, non-blocking network fabrics that deliver the throughput, low latency, and lossless transport required by HPC, GPU cluster, and distributed storage workloads (network connectivity only; does not design or manage the compute/HPC cluster itself)

• Defines routing and control-plane architecture across BGP, OSPF, and EVPN, including multi-site route policy, redistribution, and traffic engineering

• Architects and maintains Cisco ACI fabric environments, including tenant design, endpoint groups, contracts, and fabric integration

• Architects and maintains Cisco SD-Access (SDA) fabric environments, including underlay/overlay design, fabric edge/border/control-plane nodes, and DNA Center-based policy and segmentation

• Designs, configures, and troubleshoots Palo Alto Networks firewalls, including security policy design, NAT, VPN, and threat prevention

• Designs and manages network access control (NAC) policies and device compliance using Forescout or similar tools

• Leads capacity planning and lifecycle strategy for data center and WAN infrastructure, balancing performance, redundancy, and cost

• Serves as the highest-level escalation point for complex, service-impacting data center and WAN incidents, including routing protocol, fabric/switching connectivity, and firewall policy conflicts, driving root-cause analysis and long-term remediation

• Owns and is held accountable to defined delivery metrics for data center and WAN infrastructure including …