Backbone & Peering Network Architect
Location: Dallas, TX
Work Arrangement: Hybrid, 3 days onsite / 2 days remote
Employment Type: Direct Hire
Overview
Our client is seeking an experienced
Backbone & Peering Network Architect to lead the design and architecture of large-scale data center backbone networks, WAN connectivity, cloud interconnects, and customer peering environments supporting high-performance computing and AI infrastructure.
This role will be responsible for defining scalable, resilient, and secure network architectures that support high-bandwidth, low-latency workloads across data center, cloud, carrier, and customer environments.
The ideal candidate brings deep experience in
data center networking, carrier-grade routing, peering ecosystems, traffic engineering, and multi-tenant network design, along with the ability to develop architectural standards that support both current operations and long-term infrastructure growth.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and evolution of large-scale data center backbone and data center interconnect (DCI) environments.
- Design highly available, scalable, and resilient network architectures supporting HPC, AI/ML, and other performance-intensive workloads.
- Develop and maintain reference architectures for WAN connectivity, carrier interconnects, cloud service provider connectivity, and backbone expansion.
- Define architectural standards for routing, traffic engineering, redundancy, failover, telemetry, and network observability.
- Design and optimize high-capacity connectivity between data centers, cloud platforms, carriers, customers, and external network providers.
- Develop secure multi-tenant networking architectures that provide customer isolation, predictable performance, and SLA adherence.
- Establish standards for peering, transit, interconnection, and network capacity management.
- Align backbone architecture with long-term capacity forecasts, infrastructure expansion, and business growth.
- Partner with Solutions Architects, platform teams, and infrastructure engineering teams to ensure network designs align with application and workload requirements.
- Ensure security, segmentation, compliance, monitoring, and operational visibility are embedded throughout the network architecture.
- Evaluate routing policies, traffic flows, bandwidth requirements, latency, and failure scenarios across large-scale distributed environments.
- Support capacity modeling, topology simulations, and digital twin initiatives for network planning and performance analysis.
- Evaluate emerging networking technologies and recommend solutions that improve scalability, resiliency, performance, and operational efficiency.
- Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance to engineering and operations teams responsible for implementing network designs.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Network Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
- 7+ years of experience designing or architecting large-scale data center, backbone, service provider, or carrier networks.
- Deep expertise with modern data center networking architectures, including:
- Leaf-spine / Clos fabrics
- EVPN
- VXLAN
- BGP
- Large-scale Layer 3 architectures
- Strong experience with WAN architecture, carrier connectivity, internet peering, transit, and interconnect strategies.
- Strong understanding of routing policy, traffic engineering, redundancy, failover, network convergence, and capacity planning.
- Experience designing highly available, high-bandwidth, low-latency network environments.
- Experience with multi-tenant network segmentation and secure customer connectivity.
- Strong understanding of network security, observability, telemetry, monitoring, and performance management.
- Experience supporting large-scale data center, hyperscale, HPC, or distributed infrastructure environments.
- Strong documentation skills with the ability to develop network standards, diagrams, reference architectures, and technical design documentation.
- Ability to communicate complex network concepts effectively to engineering teams, leadership, customers, and other stakeholders.
Preferred Experience
- Experience supporting HPC, AI/ML, GPU-accelerated computing, or large-scale distributed systems.
- Experience designing networks for high-bandwidth and latency-sensitive workloads.
- Knowledge of cloud connectivity and private interconnect technologies across major cloud providers.
- Experience with large-scale infrastructure monitoring, network automation, capacity modeling, or simulation platforms.
- Familiarity with digital twin concepts and network topology modeling.
- Experience working with telecommunications carriers, colocation providers, internet exchanges, or cloud network providers.
- Previous technical leadership, architecture leadership, or large-scale infrastructure project experience.
Work Authorization
Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship now or in the future.
Benefits & Perks
- 100% employer-paid medical coverage through the company-sponsored high-deductible health plan.
- Employer-paid dental and vision coverage for employees and eligible family members.
- 401(k) with 100% company match on employee contributions up to 6%.
- 25 days of paid time off plus 12 company holidays.
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
- Employer-paid life insurance, short-term disability, and long-term disability coverage.
- Employee Assistance Program.
- Health Savings Account options with company contributions.
- Flexible Spending Account options.
- Additional voluntary benefits and wellness programs.
- Company-provided lunch stipend.