Telco Principal Architect

Contract: Telco Principal Architect
Start Date: ASAP
Duration: 6 months
Location: Remote
Rate: £640 - £680 per day outside of IR35
Reference: 20120

Role Summary
Solution architecture contract assignment to deliver design decisions on major private cloud deployment for a Telco customer. Strong Telco architecture experience and high-level stakeholder engagement are essential.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the end-to-end architecture within project scope.
• Lead Architecture Review Boards and drive technical decision-making.
• Provide thought leadership across delivery teams and customer stakeholders.
• Control technical scope, assess change impacts, and manage risks/RAID.
• Ensure platform readiness for application onboarding and alignment with test strategy.
• Govern technical workstreams across network, compute, virtualisation and storage.
• Ensure security, compliance, service transition and OSS/tooling integration.
• Represent architecture in programme boards, steering committees and exec updates.
• Work on infrastructure deployment for target workloads on Red Hat OpenShift and Wind River.
• Produce high- and low-level designs

Required Experience & Skills

• Architecture leadership for on-prem Kubernetes platforms (preferably OpenShift/OpenStack, Wind River).
• Strong Telco background, including regulatory/TSA considerations.
• Proven experience creating HLDs/LLDs.
• Expertise with RHV, Kubernetes/OpenShift, cloud-native deployments and bare-metal/ZTP automation.
• Familiarity with VMware (vSphere/vSAN/NSX-T) and migration to Red Hat/Wind River.
• Advantageous: OpenShift TNC, Calico, MetalLB, Istio, Pure/Portworx storage, OpenStack (Red Hat & Wind River), KubeVirt, Arista/Cisco networking.
• Awareness of CI/CD, GitLab and DevOps principles.

Networking People (UK) is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.