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 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.