Principal Network Architect

Who we are:

Digital Edge is a trusted and forward-looking data centre platform company, established to transform digital infrastructure in Asia. Backed by Stonepeak, a leading alternative investment firm specialising in infrastructure and real assets, Digital Edge has in excess of US$1 billion in committed capital.

Our mission is to bridge the digital divide across Asia Pacific by building the sustainable digital ecosystems of the future. Through building and operating state-of-the-art, energy efficient data centres rich with connectivity options, we bring new colocation and interconnect options to the Asian market, making digital infrastructure deployment in the region easy, efficient and economical.

Founded in 2020 the company has grown rapidly across multiple markets in the region, and currently provides data centre and fibre services across China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. This role is an exciting opportunity to join our fast growing team as we further expand our footprint across Asia.

Our Values:

• Responsibility: We take ownership of our actions and outcomes.
• Innovation: We embrace change and create bold solutions.  
• Strive: We show grit, resilience and relentless drive.
• Excellence: We pursue the highest standards in all we do.   
• Respect: We act with integrity and treat others with dignity.

What we need:

Reporting to the Director of Digital Infrastructure Operations, the Principal Network Architect owns the end-to-end network architecture across Digital Edge’s WAN, backbone, data centre, interconnection and hybrid cloud environments. The role combines deep network expertise with a practical understanding of compute, operating systems, virtualisation, storage and application dependencies to deliver high-performance, resilient services.

The architect will translate business and workload requirements into integrated designs, evaluate trade-offs across infrastructure domains, and lead delivery with systems, platform, security and application teams. Success is measured by end-to-end service performance, availability, recoverability, operational efficiency and lifecycle cost.

Key responsibilities:

1. Holistic Infrastructure Architecture

• Own integrated architecture, reference designs, and roadmaps connecting physical and optical infrastructure, IP networks, compute, storage, and platforms.
• Map application flows and service dependencies; define capacity, latency, availability, security, recovery, and lifecycle cost requirements.
• Document design trade-offs, migration plans, acceptance criteria and operational ownership for each architecture decision.
• Establish and govern network architecture standards, design principles and an architecture review process, ensuring new builds and expansions across the regional portfolio conform to approved designs.
• Develop CapEx and OpEx business cases, total cost of ownership models and multi-year network budgets to support new data centre builds and capacity expansion.

2. Systems and Platform Design Considerations

• Apply a working understanding of Linux, server hardware, CPU and memory resources, virtualisation, and containers to network design decisions; hands-on engineering of these platforms remains with the systems and platform teams.
• Assess how host networking, TCP/IP behaviour, NICs, MTU, virtual switches, load balancers, DNS, and time synchronisation affect service delivery.
• Account for storage access, I/O performance, replication, clustering, and backup traffic when designing bandwidth, latency, and recovery requirements.
• Engage systems and application specialists during design to understand host, storage, and service dependencies, and review workload test results to confirm network designs meet performance requirements.

3. Network Service Architecture and Technology Selection

• Architect WAN, backbone, data centre, internet and cloud connectivity as an integrated end-to-end design across sites, carriers and markets, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6.
• Select the appropriate routing, switching, overlay and transport technologies for each service type, such as internal infrastructure, customer interconnection, data centre interconnect and cloud connectivity, based on scale, resilience, latency, security, operational complexity and cost.
• Define routing and traffic-control architecture principles, including domain hierarchy, policy, segmentation, traffic engineering and convergence, proving each principle with working reference configurations before engineering teams complete detailed design and rollout.
• Maintain a technology selection framework and service design patterns that map service requirements to approved technologies, reviewing them as technologies and business needs evolve.
• Architect customer interconnection services, including cross-connects, internet exchange, IP transit and cloud on-ramps, and support sales and solutions teams with customer-facing technical design and pre-sales engagement.

4. Physical Infrastructure and Optical Transport

• Define cabling and physical infrastructure standards, including patching, labelling, route diversity and acceptance testing, ensuring the physical design supports the resilience and capacity needs of each service.
• Select the appropriate optical transport approach for each service type, such as dark fibre, DWDM or managed wavelength services, based on capacity, reach, latency, protection and cost.
• Validate optical and physical designs through link budget validation, transceiver interoperability and acceptance testing before handover to engineering for build and rollout.

5. Service Performance and Resilience

• Engineer high throughput and predictable latency, jitter, and packet loss through capacity planning, QoS, traffic engineering, and system tuning.
• Align network redundancy and convergence with host clustering, application failover, storage replication, and recovery time and recovery point objectives.
• Design failure domains and diverse paths; validate service behaviour during peak load, maintenance, and link, device, host, or site failures.
• Define service-level indicators and objectives, telemetry, and performance baselines spanning network and systems components.
• Architect network security controls in partnership with the security team, including segmentation, zero-trust access, firewalling, DDoS mitigation, MACsec and IPsec encryption, and secure management-plane design.

6. Technical Leadership and Delivery

• Lead design reviews, proofs of concept, migrations, and production readiness across infrastructure, platform, security, and application teams.
• Produce reference configuration snippets for each design and prove them in a lab or proof-of-concept environment on target platforms, demonstrating the design is workable and operational before handover to engineering for full build and rollout.
• Guide complex fault isolation across physical, optical, network, operating system, and platform layers, working with domain specialists.
• Mentor engineers, maintain clear design and operational documentation, and explain architectural decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for complex or major network incidents, participating in on-call escalation as required, and lead post-incident reviews that identify systemic and architectural root causes, resolving them through corrections to reference designs, standards and permanent corrective actions.

7. Automation and AI Operations

• Champion network automation and NetDevOps practices, including infrastructure as code using Terraform and Ansible, a network source of truth, CI/CD pipelines for configuration changes, pre-change validation and streaming telemetry, driving configuration consistency and lifecycle management across the estate.
• Define the architecture and governance for AI-assisted network operations, including AI agents connected to network automation, telemetry and source-of-truth platforms through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), with guardrails such as read-only defaults, human approval for changes, role-based access and audit logging.

8. Vendor and Commercial Management

• Own the Request for Proposal (RFP) process with OEMs and partners, defining technical requirements, evaluation criteria and scoring models to give full visibility of competing solutions and a like-for-like technical and commercial comparison.
• Shape vendor and carrier strategy, providing input to commercial negotiations and managing strategic OEM, partner and carrier relationships.

The successful candidate:

• 15+ years of network engineering experience, including at least 7 years in an architecture role, delivering large-scale WAN and backbone architecture, with demonstrated systems knowledge and cross-domain solution ownership.
• Expert knowledge of routing, switching, overlay and transport technologies, such as BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, MPLS, Segment Routing and EVPN-VXLAN, with the judgement to select the right technology for each service type.
• Strong expertise in physical cabling, DWDM, optical technologies, and integration of optical transport with IP networks.
• Working understanding of Linux, compute infrastructure, virtualisation, storage concepts, and application connectivity dependencies, sufficient to inform network design decisions.
• Hands-on configuration and lab validation skills across major network operating systems, such as Cisco IOS XR and NX-OS, Juniper Junos and Arista EOS, with the ability to build and test working reference configurations.
• Hands-on experience with network automation and infrastructure as code, including Terraform, Ansible and Python, together with version control and CI/CD workflows.
• Ability to diagnose service performance using host metrics, logs, packet analysis, and network telemetry, and distinguish network from system constraints.

• Proven delivery of holistic solutions balancing workload needs, security, resilience, capacity, operational complexity, and cost.
• Working knowledge of network security architecture and compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 and PCI DSS, and of data centre and telecommunications regulatory requirements across Asia Pacific markets.
• Experience developing business cases, budgets, vendor evaluations and RFPs, including technical and commercial comparison of OEM and partner proposals, and presenting architectural recommendations to senior leadership and customers.
• Experience working across multiple countries in Asia Pacific, with willingness to travel regionally as required.
• Strong technical leadership and stakeholder management; a relevant degree or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred (advantageous):

• Network design and architecture certifications such as Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) or Cisco Certified Architect (CCAr).
• CCIE, JNCIE, or equivalent advanced expertise, complemented by systems, cloud, or platform engineering experience.
• Experience with SRv6, Segment Routing traffic engineering, coherent optical backbones, and disaster recovery exercises.
• Experience with AI-assisted network operations (AIOps), including large language model agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations with network tooling.

Success measures:

• Designs are handed to engineering with validated reference configurations, with minimal rework needed during implementation.
• Integrated solutions meet agreed service availability, response time, throughput, capacity, and recovery objectives.
• Workloads sustain planned growth and defined failures; migrations and maintenance meet service continuity targets.
• Cross-domain design and automation reduce bottlenecks, recurring incidents, recovery effort, and lifecycle cost.