Senior Network Designer (Network Modernization Program)
- Contract Opportunity - 12-month term
- Possibility of Extensions: Yes
- Hybrid Work - 3 days/week at the Hamilton / Markham / Toronto offices required. Meetings could be in the GTHA
- Work Hours: 7 Hours a Day or 35 hours/week, Monday to Friday
The Agency is undertaking various network and network security modernization initiatives to support secure, reliable, and scalable connectivity across its enterprise and province-wide network services. The Senior Network Designer will provide architecture and design expertise to strengthen network services, support integration across on-premises and cloud environments, and align solutions with business and security requirements. The resource will support assigned projects and additional network and network security-related initiatives identified during the engagement.
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Key Responsibilities & Deliverables:
- Responsible for creating architectures, roadmaps, and plans for the interconnection of multiple Agency products and services in the context of Provincial system integrations and overall Provincial strategic objectives.
- Provide technical expertise as required on any ongoing network and network security initiatives
- Guides and influences portfolios and partners to align solutions to the Agency’s digital vision considering provincial, national, and international mandates.
- Using an automation-first approach, develops visionary solutions, as well as the tactical approaches to deliver them, for complex provincial and regional initiatives that meet customer needs and timelines, while adhering to overall enterprise architecture vision and organizational business plans.
- Reduces current and future costs across local, provincial, and national initiatives by identifying misalignments, duplication of efforts, and other opportunities for improvement in the architecture and escalates, proposes, and drives to deliver practical, efficient, and reusable solutions.
- Solve complex problems that span multiple assets and promote architecture patterns and principles to ensure reusability and maintainability.
- Develop and design the VNA Cloud connectivity in support of centralizing the digital imaging repositories for OCInet
- Ability to gather, review, and provide feedback to business requirements.
Deliverables Include:
- Providing insights and recommendations based on network modernization and connectivity strategies across other industries (i.e., banking, retail, telecommunications, airlines, etc.)
- Contribute to the architectural design for ONE Network (Next Gen) in preparation for network modernization and any procurements
- Architectural design for the VNA Cloud connectivity and migration strategy
- Design of ISE deployment, including sample configuration and deployment models for the different types of devices/users that will potentially connect
- Network automation initiatives that achieve measurable improvements in provisioning, configuration management, compliance validation, and operational support efficiency
NOTE: Demonstrated deliverables from current and previous contracts may be provided as formal documents, review comments, working-session outputs, annotated artifacts, decision notes, issue logs, or other written outputs accepted.
Ideal Resource / Must-Have experience & skills:
- WAN Architecture & Transformation: The candidate has End-to-End Architecture Delivery (Strategy → Migration)
- Cloud Connectivity (Hybrid/Multi-Cloud): The candidate has designed Direct Connect / ExpressRoute, Transit architectures, multi-cloud integration (AWS + Azure)
- Secure Architecture (SASE / Zero Trust Architecture Expertise): Demonstrated ability to apply standard security controls (firewalls, segmentation)
- Automation and AIOps: Led the implementation of Automation and AIOps solutions that delivered measurable operational efficiencies
- End-to-End Architecture Delivery (Strategy → Migration): Led full lifecycle: current state → future state → migration → transition architecture
- Ability to integrate WAN with modern security controls
- Familiarity with monitoring/observability platforms for WAN performance
- Understanding the complexities and features of ISE (Cisco Identity Services Engine)
- Understanding of NDR (Network Detection and Response)
- Excellent Oral and written communication skills – present to stakeholders and technical teams
Key Qualifiers:
- 10+ years designing and operating large-scale enterprise and provider WAN environments
- Proven experience with MPLS-based architectures, including traffic engineering and QoS
- Strong understanding of routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, IS-IS)
- Demonstrated experience leading MPLS-to-SD-WAN transformation initiatives
- Telecom experience is an asset
- Experience delivering measurable business outcomes through network automation and AI-driven operations, including the automation of provisioning, configuration management, compliance validation, incident response, and operational reporting.
- Experience designing greenfield WAN connectivity for cloud environments, with AWS (VPC, Transit Gateway, DirectConnect)
- Hybrid architecture design (on-prem + multi-cloud)
- Ability to produce high-quality architecture diagrams as well as other design documents
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills to identify gaps and opportunities within domains, sectors and/or solutions, and drive improvement and efficiency; create strategies to mitigate various types of business, privacy, security, and financial risks; define and drive alternative solutions to meet business and technical problems across teams, portfolios and products; influence provincial project planning by identifying architecturally significant cross-project and system dependencies.
- Strong communication skills, both oral and written, with an ability to engage with internal and external stakeholders to understand business needs: facilitate, negotiate, and communicate in support of internal and external partner engagement at local and provincial levels, and able to deliver presentation material, design documents and/or training material for both technical and non-technical audiences and drive to consensus between internal stakeholders with conflicting goals and priorities; communicate to internal and external executives, business domain stakeholders and technical staff.
- Ability to stay current on business strategy and assess new trends with respect to the Agency’s business needs, and identify opportunities, impacts and transformations required to realize their value and assess their implications on the future state of specific products or portfolios.
- Ability to stay abreast of provincial, national, and international business, technology, architecture, and solution design trends.
- Ability to understand and translate strategic, tactical, and operational business requirements into effective architectures and designs.
- Ability to interpret and apply IT privacy and security standards, principles, and regulations applicable to the health care sector (such as FIPPA, PHIPA) in the development of architecture solutions.
- Experience designing enterprise firewall architectures, with a preference for CheckPoint technologies, including Maestro, policy architecture, segmentation, high availability, and VPN design.
- Experience designing secure hybrid network architectures connecting on-premises datacentres with AWS and Azure cloud environments, including Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, Transit Gateway, routing, and enterprise connectivity patterns.
