Network Architect

Weather Group Television LLC•Atlanta, GA

About The Position

Allen Media Group is seeking an experienced Network Architect to design, optimize, and oversee its network and firewall infrastructure, ensuring that data, cloud, and security systems are scalable, reliable, and secure. This is the deepest technical role on the network team and owns the design of corporate, data center, cloud, and live-content media networks. The position leads through technical authority and credibility rather than direct supervision; it has no direct reports. It is a hands-on role that includes writing configurations, participating in maintenance windows, handling outage escalations, and mentoring engineers. The architect is the subject matter expert for network and security infrastructure and is accountable for the correctness of the architecture and network availability. The role owns LAN, WAN, hybrid onsite/cloud, and Palo Alto firewall architecture, along with remote access, edge connectivity, segmentation, monitoring visibility, network standards, capacity planning, and technology lifecycle. It leads operational health and significant changes in a 24x7 environment, including incident response, maintenance planning, postmortems, and corrective actions. The position also produces detailed design and operational documentation, communicates technical decisions and risk to executives, and coordinates with internal teams and external vendors, carriers, and technology partners.

Requirements

At least 10 years of enterprise network engineering experience, including at least 3 years in an architect- or principal-level role.
Expert-level, design-level routing and switching expertise, including BGP, OSPF, VXLAN/EVPN, multicast, QoS, and high availability.
Deep hands-on experience with Palo Alto platforms, including PAN-OS and Panorama, and Cisco platforms, including Catalyst, Nexus, ACI, and Meraki switches and routers.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating networks in a 24x7 environment where downtime is externally visible.
Strong troubleshooting discipline, including packet capture, flow analysis, and structured fault isolation under pressure.
Track record of leading technical work through people who do not report to the candidate.
Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
Ability to communicate clearly in technical documentation, incident updates, and presentations to technical and executive audiences.

Nice To Haves

CCIE, CCNP, Palo Alto certification, or equivalent depth demonstrated through work history.
Familiarity with multicast protocol implementation and configuration.
Experience with a data center or facility build, migration, or consolidation.
Familiarity with network monitoring and network observability platforms.
SD-WAN and cloud connectivity design experience, including Direct Connect or GCP Interconnect.
Automation or scripting for network configuration and validation, using Python or an equivalent.
AI experience to accelerate troubleshooting and problem resolution, automate repetitive tasks, and increase operational efficiency.

Responsibilities

Plan, design, and own LAN, WAN, and hybrid onsite/cloud architecture, and develop a roadmap to keep it current and incorporate new technologies.
Produce detailed architecture documentation that states requirements, constraints, alternatives, failure modes, and migration paths.
Maintain IP and VLAN schemas and configuration standards.
Set routing and switching standards; analyze traffic patterns, monitor performance, and address latency, bottlenecks, and bandwidth issues.
Design measurable resilience, eliminate single points of failure on network paths, and document and test failure-path behavior.
Own network capacity planning and technology lifecycle, and develop data-supported purchasing and refresh cases.
Evaluate platforms and vendors on technical merit and provide defensible recommendations to management, including recommendations not to buy.
Prepare project plans, budget estimates, and resource requirements for infrastructure deployments.
Partner technically with other teams on operational and engineering needs.
Own Palo Alto firewall architecture, including PAN-OS platform design, Panorama management, App-ID/User-ID policy, decryption strategy, high availability, URL filtering, AI security, and geo-location rules.
Own remote access and edge architecture, including GlobalProtect, ZTNA/SASE direction, internet edge, and cloud connectivity.
Design network segmentation and east-west controls, including data center microsegmentation strategy.
Ensure logging and flow visibility are delivered to network monitoring and security tools.
Monitor URL categories, technologies, and vulnerabilities, and recommend upgrades, changes, licenses, or new technologies as appropriate.
Own day-to-day network operational health, including monitoring, alerting, incident queues, change quality, code upgrades, policies, and procedures.
Set engineering standards and review significant changes before implementation.
Own change planning and maintenance windows in a 24x7 environment, including pre-checks, rollback, post-change validation, and coordination with on-air schedules.
Serve as the top escalation point for network incidents and lead technical bridge calls.
Own postmortems and drive corrective actions to completion.
Mentor engineers and develop team capabilities to avoid single-threaded operations.
Coordinate shared work with other business-unit technologists by agreeing on outcomes, setting expectations, and following through to closure.
Represent the technical team in vendor, carrier, and architecture review sessions.
Write clear designs, standards, change records, and incident narratives.
Present and defend architecture to technical peers and explain decisions in terms of cost, risk, and on-air impact to executives.
Communicate incident updates on a defined cadence, including known information, unknowns, actions, and timing of the next update.
Proactively give management accurate status on progress, delays, and decisions needed.
Take ownership of architecture decisions and their consequences, verify failover through testing, surface issues early with recommendations, and take responsibility for team outcomes.