IP/Layer 3 Presales Solutions Architect

About the role

A client is looking for a Senior IP/MPLS Solutions Architect to act as a pre-sales technical leader for utility and telecommunications customers. Working with Account Executives and Sales Engineers, the architect designs and positions packet, routed and transport networking solutions, validates them through demonstrations and proof-of-concept, and helps position professional and managed services in customer offers.

Key responsibilities

• Serve as the senior IP/MPLS technical authority during customer engagements in the utility and telecom sectors.
• Partner with sales teams to qualify opportunities, identify technical requirements and build winning solution strategies.
• Design IP/MPLS, Segment Routing, EVPN and Layer 2/3 VPN architectures integrated with packet-optical and optical transport networks.
• Develop reference architectures covering IP addressing, routing policy, resiliency, QoS, timing and synchronization, and multi-vendor interoperability.
• Translate utility needs (SCADA, teleprotection, substation connectivity, control-center communications, deterministic latency, cybersecurity) and telecom service provider needs (backbone, metro, DCI, mobile transport, wholesale, enterprise) into secure, resilient designs.
• Position automation, orchestration, lifecycle management and managed services in customer solutions.
• Deliver presentations, demos, whiteboard sessions, workshops and proof-of-concepts, and act as a trusted advisor through the sales cycle.
• Support proposals, pricing, bills of materials, statements of work and RFI/RFP responses, and hand off designs to implementation and professional services teams.

Required profile

• At least 7 years designing, deploying or supporting IP/MPLS networks in service provider, utility or large enterprise WAN environments.
• Previous solutions architecture, pre-sales engineering, consulting or customer-facing technical experience strongly preferred.
• Experience in complex customer environments and multi-vendor settings.
• Strong communication with technical and executive audiences, independent and collaborative work, and moderate to extensive travel may be required.

Required skills

• BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, route policies, convergence, resiliency and traffic engineering.
• MPLS technologies: LDP, RSVP-TE, L2VPN, L3VPN, VPLS, EVPN, Segment Routing (SR-MPLS), SRv6, MPLS-TP, Carrier Ethernet.
• Timing and synchronization (PTP, SyncE), QoS, multicast, BFD, fast reroute, high availability.
• Optical networking: IP over DWDM, DWDM/ROADM, attenuation, dispersion, OSNR, link budget, SONET/SDH/OTN.
• Utility and telecom architectures, including SCADA and teleprotection.
• Network management, SNMP, NETCONF/YANG, REST APIs, telemetry, SDN, NFV; Python and Ansible exposure preferred.