Network Planning Specialist

The Network Solutions Architect is responsible for the design, governance, and evolution of network solutions that support organisational objectives across enterprise, cloud, and hybrid environments. The role combines strategic architecture leadership with operational and people management responsibilities, ensuring network services are secure, resilient, scalable, and aligned to business needs. This includes providing technical leadership throughout implementation, supporting complex deployments, validating designs, troubleshooting critical issues, and working alongside engineering teams to ensure solutions are delivered in accordance with architectural standards and business requirements. The role requires a balance of strategic thinking and practical execution, with accountability for translating architectural vision into successful operational outcomes while leading and developing a high-performing network solutions team. The successful candidate will lead architecture and design activities while managing a team of network professionals, overseeing performance, development, resource planning, and operational excellence. You will need to support and deliver to cross functional teams within the Global business which means you will need to adapt to ways of working being flexible to their needs. The role has the potential to include overnight and weekend working to support project delivery and act as a point of escalation for the operational support teams. International travel will be required when necessitated by project delivery. Design end-to-end network solutions for business and technology initiatives. Produce high-level and detailed network architecture designs. Define network standards, patterns, and roadmaps. Lead network design reviews and technical governance activities. Provide architectural guidance for cloud, hybrid-cloud, and on-premises environments. Support major transformation programmes and infrastructure modernisation projects. Develop and maintain network technology roadmaps. Recommend improvements to network performance, security, resilience, and automation. Drive adoption of software-defined and cloud-based networking solutions. Network Security & Compliance Ensure security principles are embedded into all network solutions. Collaborate with cybersecurity teams to implement secure architectures. Project & Delivery Leadership Lead technical design activities for complex projects. Act as the senior technical authority for network-related initiatives. Support project managers with planning, estimation, and risk management. Lead, mentor, and develop a team of network solutions engineers and specialists. Set individual objectives and performance expectations. Conduct regular one-to-one meetings and performance reviews. Resource & Workforce Planning Manage contractor and supplier resources where required. Ensure network services meet agreed service levels and operational targets. Monitor team performance against agreed metrics and OKR's Networking Data centre networking (Cisco) Network segmentation Routing and switching on a global scale (BGP, OSPF, MPLS, VXLAN) Cloud Networking Networking within Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity ExpressRoute, Direct Connect, VPN, and cloud transit architectures Firewalls and network security controls (Palo Alto) Network Access Control (NAC) Secure remote access solutions Network monitoring and threat detection CIS Controls Icinga, Grafana, Prometheus Ansible Terraform Network automation frameworks High Availability (HA) network design. Disaster Recovery (DR) planning and implementation. Active-active and active-passive network architectures. Multi-site and geographically resilient network deployments. Cloud resilience and multi-region networking. Data centre redundancy and resilience design. Network failover and recovery testing. Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty Microsoft Certified: Azure Network Engineer Associate ITIL Accreditation (desirable) Project Management accreditation (desirable) Strong planning and organisation skills including the ability to manage several work streams simultaneously.