Principal Network Architect
Englewood Cliffs, NJ

Job Description

Responsibilities

NBCUniversal's Distribution Engineering group within the Operations & Technology organization has an opening for a Principal Network Architect. This engineering role will be filled by a senior network professional to define, collaborate and communicate strategy for network technologies spanning the NBCU portfolios.

The Principal Network Architect, reporting to the Vice President, Distribution Engineering, will work with cross-functional organizations to define and maintain strategic direction tied to the overall business and technology strategy. They will work closely with Network Engineering and IT organizations to provide guidance on direction and ensure strategic direction is in line with current technology and business requirements. The selected candidate will attend industry events to influence the industry based on NBCU strategic direction and to stay up to date on future networking technology, concepts and practices. This position will also provide subject matter expertise and work closely with all teams in LA, Denver, Miami, New York and New Jersey in defining requirements, architecture and assist with complex problem analysis.

* Perform analytical, technical, and financial analysis in the planning, design, installation of enterprise network solutions.
* Defines strategy for leading-edge, business-critical solutions for major, enterprise-wide solutions.
* Ensures that all architectural artifacts and deliverables are developed to the highest quality standards; provides architectural review and approval for major solutions.
* Provides leadership and effectively communicates with all levels of management in areas related to solution architecture and future technical strategy.
* Evaluate and provide recommendations of overall network requirements for performance, availability, utilization and reliability
* Design, implement and tune TCP/IP networking stack across various operating systems
* Presents technology or infrastructure-based papers to major conferences and publishes papers in professional journals and publications.
* Works with vendors on new technology solutions.
* Leverage and assist in the development of tools and processes to proactively monitor the health of the network and respond to events.
* Leads Proof of Concept scoping and testing.
* Mentor, educate and train engineers to become subject matter experts.

Qualifications/Requirements

Potential candidates must possess a range of the following skills:

* Extensive knowledge and experience of Core Routing and Switching design, configuration, and troubleshooting
* SP background / Large Enterprise scale infrastructure
* Knowledge of networking best practices in:

o Routing protocols OSPF, EIGRP, BGP, ISIS

o Spanning-tree, VTP, Port Channels, Load balancing, SPAN

o Multicast PIM Sparse/Dense, MSDP

o MPLS traffic engineering design, configuration, and troubleshooting

o LDP - Label distribution

o MPBGP-VPNv4, Multi-VRF and VRF-Lite

o Segment Routing Concepts

o NAT

o Quality of Service (QoS) understanding and configuration, able to customize across all Cisco platforms to support Video, and selected applications

* Excellent understanding of VPN - site to site, client, IPSEC (including the protocol suite), IKE, tunnel modes, SSL clientless / AnyConnect, Tunnels between ASAs, Routers
* Extensive experience and strong technical skills including the design, configuration, and tuning of Cisco, Juniper, and Palo Alto firewalls
* Extensive experience and expertise of F5 Load Balancers, GTM and LTM's
* Knowledge and understanding of network security best practices
* Experience with monitoring and deploying, network diagnostic and network analytics tools.
* Automation Experience:

o Build network configurations as code in a reproducible, idempotent manner.

o Create network automated deployments with a robust suite of unit-tests to ensure each push is self-tested before and after the roll-out.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

* B.S. degree in Information Technology, Business Administration or equivalent experience
* Cisco CCNP/CCIE active certification
* Minimum 10-years' experience leading complex project network builds with proven ability to define and communicate strategic direction
* Demonstrated successful design, planning and implementation of wide and local area network architecture, including troubleshooting and capacity planning
* Expertise working on a team with motivated cross functional individuals focused on a common goal of delivering cutting edge solutions to meet aggressive business demands in an ever-changing environment to achieve on-time and on budget completion of projects
* Strong communication skills
* Solid documentation experience with Visio, Word, Excel
* Excellent IP networking fundamentals and extensive experience in the application of IP protocols. In-depth knowledge of and experience with major internet routing protocols, including BGP, OSPF, MPLS, RSVP.
* Experience/knowledge in SDN, NFV, and SDWAN technologies.
* Solid understanding of DNS solutions, Active Directory, and other LDAPs solutions.
* Prior experiences in identifying potential design, performance, security, and support problems, including ability to identify technical risks/challenges and develop relevant mitigation strategies.
* Extensive knowledge of the broad spectrum of technology areas, including technology trends, forthcoming industry standards, new products, and the latest solution development techniques; ability to leverage this knowledge to formulate technical solution strategy.
* Understanding of hardware architecture and limitations including

o Buffers

o ASICs / port boundaries

o CAM / TCAM

* • Expert-level knowledge and experience with design, implementation and support of the following:

o Programmable Infrastructure (APIs, Scripting, PYTHON, JSON) strongly desired

o Complex routing and switching solutions (Cisco is a must, Juniper and Arista preferred)

o Multi-protocol environments, with mutual redistribution of routing protocols

o Multicast

o QoS

Desired Characteristics

* M.S. degree in Information Technology, Business Administration or equivalent experience
* Non-Cisco Network vendor certification (Juniper, Palo Alto, Arista, etc…)
* Experienced in cloud computing (AWS, Azure, etc.) and Cloud networking
* Experience in DevOps and IT configuration automation solutions, such as Puppet, Chef, or Ansible, etc.
* Experience with diverse networking technologies (Arista, Juniper, Cisco, Riverbed, etc.)