Network Architect, UNSW IT

Job Description:

• Employment Type: full time continuing role as a Network Architect, UNSW IT
• Excellent salary package available
• Location: Kensington campus in NSW (Hybrid Flexible Working)

About UNSW:

UNSW isn’t like other places you’ve worked. We’re a large organisation with a diverse and talented community; a community doing extraordinary things. Together, we are driven to be thoughtful, practical, and purposeful in all we do. Taking this combined approach is what makes our work matter. It’s the reason we’re one of the top 50 universities in the world and a member of Australia’s prestigious Group of Eight. If you want a career where you can thrive, be challenged and do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.

This role within Infrastructure & Platform Services shapes and steers the strategic direction of enterprise networking across the university. You will operate as a senior architectural authority, helping UNSW make clear, well-informed decisions on network strategy, investment, risk, service resilience and future capability.

This is not a purely hands-on engineering role. You will need strong technical credibility, but success in this role depends on your ability to explain complex options in plain language, influence senior stakeholders, guide trade-offs, and align architecture, engineering, cyber, operations and business stakeholders around practical outcomes. The role reports to the Lead Platform Architect and works closely with senior leadership and governance forums across the organisation.

What You Will Do:

• Strategic Architecture, Governance & Planning: Shape multi-year investment roadmaps for scalable, secure network architectures aligned to enterprise strategy. Lead or contribute to governance forums, providing clear guidance on recommendations, trade-offs, risk, cost, sequencing and service impacts.
• Leadership and Innovation: Provide architectural leadership and strategic direction across enterprise networking, including campus, wireless, WAN, data centre, security and cloud connectivity. Introduce new approaches where they add meaningful value and help UNSW make informed decisions about emerging technologies.
• Solution Design: Provide architectural oversight across network solutions, guiding high- and low-level architecture and design development. Ensure artefacts are clear, implementable, aligned to internal standards, and support effective transition to engineering and operations.
• Collaboration and Influence: Engage and influence senior stakeholders, including executives, domain leaders and technology peers. Translate complex technical choices into clear business language and help stakeholders align on direction across competing priorities.
• Operational Excellence & Compliance: Ensure network architectures are resilient, observable, secure and supportable. Work with engineering and operations teams to ensure architecture decisions improve service reliability, operational maturity and compliance outcomes.
• Capability Building: Mentor architects and engineers while uplifting organisational capability in architectural thinking, communication, decision-making and enterprise alignment. Drive adoption of best practices, sustainable design and responsible technology.

Who You Are:

• Enterprise Influencer: You influence executive stakeholders, shape technology strategy and drive alignment across a large, federated enterprise environment.
• Clear Communicator and Decision Shaper: You can explain technical concepts, options and trade-offs in plain language to senior stakeholders, governance forums and technical teams. You are comfortable presenting recommendations and shaping decisions at executive and governance levels, not just providing technical advice.
• Strategic Network Architect: You define and evolve target-state architectures and long-term roadmaps that support UNSW’s teaching, research, campus and enterprise needs. You can connect technical decisions to service outcomes, risk, cost and long-term organisational value.
• Trusted Stakeholder Partner: You build trust across architecture, engineering, operations, cybersecurity, project and business stakeholders. You bring people with different priorities together to support informed and balanced decisions.
• Proactive and Self-driven: You can bring clarity and direction to ambiguous situations, using initiative, judgement and influence to align stakeholders and deliver outcomes across complex federated environments.
• Constructive Challenger: You challenge established practices respectfully and with confidence, using evidence-based reasoning to evolve organisational capability.
• Deep Technical Credibility: You bring strong expertise in network architecture, with experience across routing, switching, wireless, WAN, data centre, security and cloud connectivity. You do not need to be the deepest hands-on engineer in every domain, but you bring enough technical depth to guide direction and earn credibility with engineering teams.
• Practical Problem Solver: With strong analytical skills and sound strategic decision-making, you adeptly tackle technical and organisational challenges and focus on outcomes rather than artefacts and “ticking the box”.
• Educated and Experienced: You possess a tertiary qualification in Computer Technology or a related field, bolstered by extensive experience delivering enterprise-scale initiatives in large organisations.
• Security and Performance Savvy: You are skilled at embedding security, resilience, performance, compliance and risk controls into network designs while ensuring solutions remain practical and supportable.
• Network Automation & Observability Advocate: You understand and promote the value of network automation, scripting, and monitoring platforms (e.g. Ansible, Python, AI-driven observability tools) in driving improvements in efficiency, resilience, and proactive issue resolution.
• Certified Professional: Your expertise is validated by relevant industry certifications (e.g., Cisco CCNP/CCIE, Juniper, AWS/Azure networking, TOGAF, ITIL) or equivalent experience affirming your technical proficiency.
• Lifelong Learner: Committed to ongoing professional development, you stay at the forefront of industry trends and emerging network technologies, continually assessing their value to UNSW.
• Values-Driven Leader: You embrace and uphold UNSW’s aims, objectives, and values, committed to furthering health and safety standards within your sphere of influence.

Benefits and Culture

People are at the core of everything we do. We recognise it is the contributions of our staff who make UNSW one of the best universities in Australia and the world.

Our benefits include:

• Flexible Working Options (work from home, flexible hours etc)
• Career development opportunities
• 17% Superannuation contributions and additional leave loading payments
• Additional 3 days of leave over Christmas period
• Discounts and entitlements (retail, education, fitness)

For further details on the benefits, please visit https://www.jobs.unsw.edu.au/lifestyle-benefits

How to Apply:

please apply through the portal, we would like you to submit a full application including resume and addressing the who you are section.

Applications close:

Tuesday 26th of May at 11.30pm

Pre-Employment Checks

Aligned with UNSW’s focus on cultivating a workplace defined by safety, ethical conduct, and strong integrity preferred candidates will be required to participate in a combination of pre-employment checks relevant to the role they have applied for.

These pre-employment checks may include a combination of some of the following checks:-

• National and International Criminal history checks
• Entitlement to work and ID checks
• Working With Children Checks
• Completion of a Gender-Based Violence Prevention Declaration
• Verification of relevant qualifications
• Verification of relevant professional membership
• Employment history and reference checks
• Financial responsibility assessments/checks.
• Medical Checks and Assessments

Compliance with the necessary combination of these checks is a condition of employment at UNSW.

Get in Touch:

Jen MacLachlan
j.maclachlan@unsw.edu.au
Talent Acquisition Partner – UNSW IT

Please apply through the application portal and not via the contact above.

UNSW is committed to equity diversity and inclusion. Applications from women, people of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, those living with disabilities, members of the LGBTIQ+ community; and people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, are encouraged. UNSW provides workplace adjustments for people with disability, and access to flexible work options for eligible staff. The University reserves the right not to proceed with any appointment.