Lead Telco Cloud Architect (Outside IR35)

Rate: £650-£680 Outside IR35

Duration: 6 months initially

Location: Remote (London 1-2 days per month)

Start date: Urgent

Role Summary

We are seeking a senior technical leader to oversee the architectural direction and delivery of a complex Telco cloud transformation. This role requires an individual capable of operating confidently with executive stakeholders while also guiding engineering teams performing detailed design and build activities. The Lead Architect will define and safeguard the overall technical architecture, ensuring the migration from VMware technologies to Red Hat and Wind River platforms is executed cohesively, securely, and in accordance with regulatory and vendor standards. This position holds responsibility for the integrity of the solution, the technical governance framework, risk management, and the alignment of all workstreams contributing to the programme. The individual will act as the authoritative voice on platform design, quality, operational readiness, and strategic decision-making. Extensive Telco architecture experience and strong stakeholder management capabilities are essential.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture, ensuring it remains aligned to the programme’s scope and boundaries.
• Lead Architecture Review Boards and provide clear direction on risks, decisions, and technical challenges.
• Act as a strategic advisor to both delivery teams and the customer, offering expert guidance throughout the programme.
• Control and assess technical scope changes, ensuring impacts are understood and managed effectively.
• Guarantee that the cloud platform provides everything required for downstream application teams to onboard workloads successfully.
• Validate that test approaches and plans support the architectural intent and operational objectives.
• Establish and enforce technical governance, working closely with project managers, account leadership, vendors, and customer engineering teams.
• Identify, track, and mitigate technical risks across the solution; maintain ownership of the technical RAID.
• Manage critical workstream interdependencies across compute, storage, virtualisation, and network fabric layers.
• Ensure all security and compliance obligations are fully met, including those driven by Telco regulations and the Telecoms Security Act.
• Support the service transition function to ensure operational teams are prepared for handover.
• Coordinate integration requirements with adjacent systems such as OSS tooling.
• Represent the architecture function in programme steering forums, leadership sessions, and executive updates.
• Oversee the deployment of infrastructure supporting the migration of applications to Red Hat OpenShift and Wind River IaaS environments.
• Produce both high-level and low-level designs in collaboration with assigned architects.
• Maintain strong relationships with a diverse set of stakeholders, balancing delivery needs and technology constraints.
• Ensure infrastructure is designed to support workload-specific requirements at scale.
• Align all solutions with the customer’s automation framework, promoting zero-touch provisioning and repeatable deployments.

Skills & Experience Required

• Proven experience architecting on-prem Kubernetes platforms, ideally with Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenStack, and Wind River.
• Background in the telecoms sector with a solid understanding of regulatory and TSA-related expectations.
• Capability to produce high-level architectural documentation and detailed design artefacts.
• Hands-on knowledge of Red Hat Virtualization, OpenShift/Kubernetes, and cloud-native operational models.
• Experience with bare-metal builds, automation frameworks, and ZTP deployment methodologies.
• Understanding of physical installation requirements for Telco-grade infrastructure.
• Strong organisational skills and the ability to operate under pressure with a proactive, solution-driven mindset.
• Familiarity with VMware (vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T) and migrations or modernisation initiatives transitioning away from VMware towards Red Hat/Wind River stacks.
• Exposure to OpenShift TNC reference architectures is highly beneficial.
• Working knowledge of networking technologies such as Calico, MetalLB, and service mesh solutions like Istio.
• Beneficial storage experience: Pure Storage, Portworx, or comparable technologies.
• Familiarity with OpenStack-based IaaS (Red Hat and Wind River variants).
• Understanding of KubeVirt for VM hosting within Kubernetes-based platforms.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical subjects to both engineers and non-technical leaders.
• Awareness of Arista or Cisco network environments and how Kubernetes clusters integrate with the underlying fabric.
• Foundational knowledge of CI/CD tooling such as GitLab and core DevOps practices, particularly when coordinating with automation architects.
• Above all, exceptional stakeholder management skills and the ability to represent the architectural function alongside programme leadership within a Telco delivery environment.