Network Architect

Job Profile Summary

Responsible for the strategic architecture, design, and technical direction of Rackspace's global data center and wide area network (WAN) infrastructure, with a primary focus on healthcare customer environments. Serves as the senior technical authority for data center fabric and WAN transport, including the high-bandwidth, low-latency network underlay required to support high-performance compute (HPC) and other data-intensive workloads. Translates healthcare business, clinical, and regulatory requirements into scalable, resilient, and secure network architectures. Acts as a liaison with vendors and third-party providers and partners closely with engineering, security, and customer teams to guide the network's strategic direction across highly available, compliance-driven healthcare infrastructure. This is a network architecture role focused on the connectivity fabric that delivers bandwidth and throughput to compute and storage platforms, not on designing or administering the HPC compute clusters themselves.

Location: US Remote - Work from Home with up to 25% Travel

Career Level Summary

• Recognized as an expert within the company and requires in-depth and/or breadth of expertise in own job discipline and broad knowledge of other job disciplines within the organization function

• Solves unique, high-impact problems that affect multiple teams, products, or customers

• Contributes to the development of organizational sub-function strategy, including data center and WAN roadmaps

• Works independently, with guidance sought only in the most complex or novel situations

• Progression to this level is typically restricted on the basis of business requirements

Critical Competencies

• Excellence: Exceeds expectations by consistently demonstrating accountability, discipline, high performance, and a proven track record of exceptional results.

• Customer-driven: Prioritizes customer needs and satisfaction through collaborative and proactive problem-solving, and an unwavering commitment to customer success.

• Expertise: Possesses deep understanding of customer needs and continually grows and enhances skills to provide customer-focused solutions.

• Agility: Quickly adapts and responds to dynamic customer needs and expectations through innovative solutions.

• Compassion: Cultivates a positive and supportive environment to effectively work together towards a common goal, fostering trust within Rackspace and with external stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Owns end-to-end architecture of the global data center fabric, including spine-leaf and Clos-based designs, EVPN/VXLAN overlay, and high-density, low-latency topologies that support both enterprise and HPC workloads

• Architects and evolves the enterprise WAN, including MPLS, SD-WAN, dark fiber, and DWDM transport, to deliver resilient, low-latency connectivity between data centers, campuses, and cloud on-ramps

• Architects high-bandwidth, non-blocking network fabrics that deliver the throughput, low latency, and lossless transport required by HPC, GPU cluster, and distributed storage workloads (network connectivity only; does not design or manage the compute/HPC cluster itself)

• Defines routing and control-plane architecture across BGP, OSPF, and EVPN, including multi-site route policy, redistribution, and traffic engineering

• Leads capacity planning and lifecycle strategy for data center and WAN infrastructure, balancing performance, redundancy, and cost

• Serves as the highest-level escalation point for complex, service-impacting data center and WAN incidents, driving root-cause analysis and long-term remediation

• Owns and is held accountable to defined delivery metrics for data center and WAN infrastructure including network availability %, MTTR for service-impacting incidents, and RTO/RPO targets for clinical-failover scenarios as established with healthcare customers and internal stakeholders.

• Coordinates incident communication and downtime procedures with hospital IT, clinical/nursing informatics, and biomedical engineering teams during service-impacting events affecting patient-care systems

• Partners with network security architecture teams to ensure segmentation, firewall policy, and access-control designs align with data center and WAN topology

• Develops automation and infrastructure-as-code practices (Python, Ansible, or equivalent) to standardize provisioning, validation, and change management across the fabric

• Plans and executes network changes around clinical change-freeze windows and blackout periods (e.g., surgical schedules, EHR go-lives), coordinating timing with hospital operations to avoid disruption to patient-care systems

• Researches, evaluates, and recommends emerging data center, WAN, and HPC networking technologies and vendors based on performance, scalability, and business value

• Leads implementation planning and peer design reviews for major infrastructure initiatives, including new data center builds, fabric refreshes, and WAN transport migrations

• Creates and maintains architecture documentation, low-level and high-level design (LLD/HLD) artifacts, network diagrams, and standard operating procedures

• Mentors and provides technical guidance to network engineers and architects across the organization

• Contributes to disaster recovery and business continuity planning for data center and WAN environments, with attention to the uptime and failover requirements of clinical and patient-care systems

• Designs network architecture to support healthcare-specific workloads, including EHR/EMR platforms (e.g., Epic, Cerner), PACS/medical imaging, HL7/FHIR integration engines, and connected medical devices, as well as life-safety network domains such as nurse call systems, physician paging, and emergency communication networks

• Ensures data center and WAN designs align with HIPAA, HITRUST, and other healthcare regulatory and compliance requirements, partnering with security and compliance teams on network segmentation and PHI data-flow controls

• Maintains audit-ready evidence of network segmentation and PHI data-flow controls to support customer HIPAA/HITRUST assessments and regulatory audits

• Architects provable tenant-to-tenant traffic isolation across shared data center and WAN infrastructure, ensuring one health system customer's PHI-bearing traffic cannot be accessed by or commingled with another's

• Supports high-availability architecture for mission-critical healthcare environments, including hospital and clinical site connectivity, disaster recovery, and zero/near-zero downtime failover

• Participates in a 24x7 on-call support rotation supporting clinical operations, with defined incident response and escalation SLAs

Knowledge

• Expert-level knowledge of data center fabric architecture, including spine-leaf design, VXLAN/EVPN overlays, and multi-site fabric interconnect

• Expert-level knowledge of WAN architecture, including MPLS, SD-WAN, and optical/DWDM transport design

• Advanced knowledge of BGP and OSPF design, troubleshooting, and traffic engineering across multi-site environments

• Strong knowledge of network security architecture and its integration with data center and WAN design

• Working knowledge of equipment and platforms from multiple vendors, such as Cisco, Aruba, and Palo Alto Networks

• Working knowledge of healthcare IT infrastructure and compliance requirements, including HIPAA, HITRUST, and network architecture supporting EHR/EMR, PACS, and clinical/biomedical device connectivity

• Working knowledge of Business Associate Agreement (BAA) implications when selecting or onboarding network transport, colocation, or cloud on-ramp vendors that touch PHI-adjacent traffic

Skills

• Data Center & WAN Architecture and Design

• High-Bandwidth Network Fabric Design for HPC/GPU Workloads

• Advanced Routing & Switching (BGP, OSPF, EVPN/VXLAN)

• Network Automation & Infrastructur