Principal Telecommunications Network Architect

Roles & Responsibilities

• Serve as a senior technical advisor on telecommunications carrier core, backbone, transport, and service architectures in support of cybersecurity, infrastructure defense, and mission assurance activities.
• Characterize end-to-end fixed & mobile telecom architectures, including signaling, control & user planes, network functions, interconnects, routing, management systems, and network visibility points.
• Partner with cyber analysts and threat hunting teams to turn mission questions into technically sound hypotheses, telecom-specific analysis methods, applicable telemetry sources, and practical findings, highlighting gaps and limitations in visibility.
• Assess telecommunications network security, service dependencies, fault & failure modes, resilience, and attack surfaces and recommend engineering mitigations and testable approaches grounded in actual carrier network behavior.
• Shape and support collaborative government-industry technical pilots and COOP activities, including PACE communications planning and alternative transport & service approaches.
• Develop and independently review system and reference architectures, interface & dataflow diagrams, technical trade studies, analysis reports, integration plans, and briefings that prioritize actions and make informed decisions.
• Collaborate directly with federal mission stakeholders, telecom operators, equipment vendors, and multidisciplinary engineering teams to reconcile requirements, validate technical assumptions, and communicate recommendations clearly.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline with 10 years of related experience; or Master's with 7 years; or PhD with 5 years; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.
• Substantial direct, hands-on experience engineering, architecting, integrating, troubleshooting, or technically assessing production-scale carrier telecommunications networks and their operational behavior.
• Demonstrated end-to-end understanding of carrier-grade telecommunications infrastructure beyond 5G radio access, including core network functions, IP transport & routing, signaling & interconnection, and the relationship between network elements, services, and operational telemetry.
• Ability to analyze complex communications architectures and identify network dependencies, technical risks, network behavior, and security & monitoring opportunities across heterogeneous legacy and modern systems.
• Experience developing technically sound architecture assessments, problem analyses, trade studies, or engineering recommendations that inform operational or programmatic decisions.
• Demonstrated senior technical leadership and ability to work effectively across engineering teams, government stakeholders, and industry partners.
• Ability to obtain and maintain the personnel suitability and access determinations required for assigned federal sponsor work.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a DHS Fitness clearance.
• Per the U.S. Government's eligibility requirements, you must be a U.S Citizen to be considered for a security clearance.
• This position requires a minimum of 3 days a week on-site.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct engineering experience with multiple generations of commercial mobile-core or fixed telecom networks, such as LTE & 5G, EPC & 5GC, IMS, Diameter, and associated roaming & interconnect architectures.
• Experience with large-scale IP, MPLS, BGP, optical transport, DCI, and carrier operations & support systems and ability to explain how these components interact.
• Hands-on experience with telecommunications threat hunting, network security analysis, incident investigation, protocol & packet inspection, or mapping threats to carrier network elements and exploitable visibility & detection points.
• Experience with communications resiliency and COOP analysis, including critical infrastructure dependencies, failure propagation, alternate communications pathways, and PACE planning.
• Experience supporting government-industry technical pilots, multistakeholder reference architectures, and evaluations of various telecom technologies.
• Prior work with telecommunications carriers, major network equipment suppliers, critical infrastructure operators, or federal mission sponsors in a senior technical advisor or chief architect role.
• Existing sponsor suitability determination or prior experience onboarding to federal civilian mission environments, with the ability to engage effectively in time-sensitive sponsor work.