Senior Network Architect: Enterprise Cisco ACI & Defence

Methods Business and Digital Technology; West of England; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

LinkedIn Learning access

Employee assistance programme

Life insurance 4x base salary

Private medical insurance

Travel insurance

25 days holiday

Job summary

Methods Business and Digital Technology Limited is seeking a Senior Network Architect to assess, document and improve enterprise network architecture in a secure defence environment. The role involves producing current-state designs, and recommendations for active/active connectivity across two data centres, with a focus on Cisco ACI and security considerations.

You will work with the client’s Architecture and Network teams, producing clear roadmaps, and ensuring changes align with risk controls

Qualifications

• Strong enterprise network architecture experience, including assessing existing implementations and producing accurate High Level Designs and Low Level Designs.
• Hands-on Cisco ACI experience, including fabric architecture, tenants, VRFs, bridge domains, endpoint groups and contracts, with an understanding of application-centric policy design.
• Strong Cisco routing knowledge and practical understanding of IP addressing, routing protocols, segmentation and connectivity between data centres.
• Experience reviewing Cisco ASA firewall configurations, traffic flows, access policies, NAT and high-availability arrangements.
• Experience with F5 load balancers, including traffic management, health monitoring, resilience and dependencies on surrounding network services.
• Experience assessing network disaster recovery and active/active designs, including failure scenarios, failover behaviour, routing symmetry and stateful service dependencies.
• Ability to investigate live configurations safely, identify technical constraints and recommend proportionate changes with clear implementation and operational impacts.
• Strong technical writing, diagramming and stakeholder communication skills, with experience taking designs through formal review and approval.

Responsibilities

• Review the live network implementation, configurations and legacy design material across both data centres, identifying gaps between documented and actual operation.
• Produce accurate current-state High Level Designs and Low Level Designs using the existing templates, supported by clear topology diagrams, connectivity flows and technical dependencies.
• Review Cisco ACI, routing, firewall and load-balancing arrangements with the Architecture and Network support teams to understand service connectivity and operational constraints.
• Produce a Network Review and Recommendation Report identifying practical improvements that can be made without significant redesign and with minimal risk to live services.
• Assess opportunities to make better use of Cisco ACI application-centric capabilities, including application relationships, segmentation and policy design.
• Present recommended improvements as a prioritised roadmap showing sequencing, interdependencies, implementation considerations and service impact.
• Produce a Network Disaster Recovery Capability Report assessing the changes required for true active/active connectivity between the two data centres.
• Explain current connectivity limitations, proposed implementation approaches, risks to existing services and any additional hardware, software or licensing requirements.
• Lead technical review discussions, resolve design comments and secure review and sign-off of design documentation from the Client’s Architecture and Network teams.
• Maintain controlled technical documentation and supporting evidence, contribute to risk and issue reporting, and submit deliverables through agreed secure channels.

Skills

Enterprise network design

Cisco ACI

Cisco routing

Cisco ASA firewall

F5 load balancers

Disaster recovery

Documentation & diagrams

Stakeholder communication

Job description

Methods Business and Digital Technology Limited is seeking a Senior Network Architect to assess, document and improve enterprise network architecture in a secure defence environment. The role involves producing current-state designs, and recommendations for active/active connectivity across two data centres, with a focus on Cisco ACI and security considerations.

You will work with the client’s Architecture and Network teams, producing clear roadmaps, and ensuring changes align with risk controls