Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Internet Architect

🎯 Role Definition

The Internet Architect owns the design, strategy and operational vision for the organization's internet-facing network and edge architecture. This role defines global routing and peering strategy, designs scalable CDN/load‑balancer topologies, secures internet ingress/egress, and drives network automation to ensure measurable improvements in latency, availability and cost. The Internet Architect partners closely with cloud, security, SRE, and product teams to translate business requirements into resilient, observable, and cost-efficient internet and WAN architectures.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Network Engineer with multi-site/global network experience
Cloud Network Engineer or Cloud Architect (networking-focused)
Senior SRE / Infrastructure Engineer with networking specialization

Advancement To:

Head of Network Architecture / Director of Network Engineering
VP of Infrastructure or VP of Cloud & Edge Services
Chief Network Officer or CTO (in network-centric organizations)

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Architect (multi-cloud networking)
Security Architect (network/security convergence)
Performance & Reliability Architect (SRE-focused)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Define and own the global internet routing and peering strategy, designing BGP policies, communities, and interconnection models to optimize latency, cost and resilience across multiple regions and IXPs.
Architect and document multi-cloud network topologies (AWS VPC, Azure VNet, GCP VPC) for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, including transit gateways, service‑chaining and secure cross‑region connectivity patterns.
Design and validate edge architectures that combine CDN, global load balancing, and WAF solutions to deliver high-performance, secure delivery of web, API and streaming traffic at scale.
Develop and maintain scalable traffic engineering plans, including MPLS/Segment Routing designs, traffic prioritization, route filtering, prefix-lists and route-maps to meet SLAs for latency and throughput.
Lead peering negotiations and establish peering relationships with ISPs, CDN providers and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) to improve traffic flows and reduce egress costs.
Create and enforce network security patterns for internet ingress/egress, including DDoS mitigation, firewall architectures, IDS/IPS integration, and secure edge termination consistent with zero-trust principles.
Produce capacity planning models and forecasting for internet bandwidth, VPNs and transit circuits using historical telemetry and business growth projections to guide procurement and cost optimization.
Drive network automation and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation) to provision networking components, standardize configurations and reduce manual change windows.
Design observability for internet architecture: define telemetry requirements, dashboards and alerting for BGP adjacencies, route flaps, peering health, latency, packet loss and application-level SLIs.
Define and implement network testing and validation frameworks (lab, canary, chaos/network resilience testing) to ensure changes do not negatively impact global routing, latency, or availability.
Work with security and SRE teams to design secure remote access, bastion host, VPN gateway and site-to-site connectivity models that meet compliance and audit requirements.
Standardize global routing policies and create clear runbooks for incident response, including escalation paths for DDoS events, BGP hijacks and large-scale peering outages.
Evaluate and select internet-facing technologies — next-gen firewalls, global load balancers (F5, NGINX, cloud LB), CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly), and transit providers — through TCO and performance analysis.
Collaborate with product and platform teams to translate business features into network requirements, assessing the impact of new products on edge capacity, security posture and routing complexity.
Lead cross-functional architecture reviews and RFCs for changes that touch internet-facing systems, ensuring backward compatibility, observability and testability.
Mentor and upskill network, cloud and SRE engineers on advanced routing, peering practices, IPv6 adoption and automation patterns.
Define and enforce tagging, naming and configuration standards for network resources across public clouds and on-prem infrastructure to improve manageability and automation.
Drive IPv6 adoption planning, dual‑stack strategies and transition mechanisms ensuring the organization is prepared for IPv6-only clients and networks.
Implement traffic cost optimization strategies, including direct peering, regional caching, egress minimization, and intelligent routing to cloud provider egress endpoints.
Manage vendor relationships and performance SLAs for transit, colocation, CDN and DDoS protection providers; conduct periodic architecture and contract reviews to align on performance and costs.
Maintain and evolve disaster recovery and business continuity networking plans, including failover routing, cross-region replication and restoration procedures for internet and WAN services.
Produce executive-friendly architecture roadmaps and cost/benefit analyses that justify network investments and demonstrate measurable KPIs for reliability, latency and cost reduction.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist in post-incident reviews, documenting root cause analysis focused on routing, peering, or edge failures and recommending long-term mitigations.
Maintain an internal knowledge base of topology diagrams, runbooks, peering agreements and contact lists for rapid operational response.
Participate in industry forums, IX meetings and standards bodies as a company representative to stay current on internet architecture trends.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Expert knowledge of BGP (route reflectors, communities, prefix-lists, route-maps) and advanced routing design for global scale.
Strong experience with L2/L3 protocols (OSPF, IS-IS, MPLS, Segment Routing) and WAN technologies.
Deep familiarity with cloud networking (AWS VPC architecture, Azure Virtual Network, GCP VPC), transit gateways and hybrid connectivity patterns.
Hands-on experience with network automation and IaC: Terraform, Ansible, Python (netmiko/napalm), or equivalent.
CDN and load balancing expertise: design and optimization with Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, F5, or cloud-native load balancers.
Proficiency with IPv4 and IPv6 planning, deployment strategies and dual-stack operations.
Solid understanding of DDoS mitigation, WAFs, firewall architectures, IDS/IPS and network-based security controls.
Knowledge of peering and interconnection models, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and ISP selection/performance benchmarking.
Monitoring and observability tooling experience (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch, ThousandEyes, RIPE Atlas) for network telemetry and SLIs.
Experience with traffic engineering, QoS, traffic shaping and capacity forecasting tools.
Familiarity with operating systems and network appliances: Linux networking, Cisco/Juniper OS, modern SDN controllers.
Experience designing and enforcing network design standards, runbooks and incident response procedures.
Understanding of compliance and regulatory impacts on network design (PCI, SOC2, GDPR) where applicable.

Soft Skills

Excellent communication and stakeholder management; able to translate technical tradeoffs to executives and product owners.
Strategic thinker with strong business acumen; prioritizes architecture investments by measurable ROI and risk reduction.
Strong collaboration skills to align cross-functional teams (security, cloud, product, SRE) and lead change.
Proven mentorship and team-building capabilities; develops junior engineers and promotes best practices.
Calm under pressure with structured incident management and post-mortem facilitation skills.
Analytical problem solver who leverages telemetry and data to drive decisions and continuous improvement.
Project management discipline: able to scope, estimate and deliver medium-to-large architectural projects on time.
Customer-focused mindset with an emphasis on performance, availability and user experience.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Telecommunications, or equivalent technical field OR equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Networking, Computer Science, or related fields and/or relevant vendor certifications (e.g., Cisco CCNP/CCIE, Juniper JNCIE, F5, AWS/Azure/GCP networking certs).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Electrical or Communications Engineering
Telecommunications
Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

7–15+ years in network engineering, site reliability or cloud networking roles with increasing architectural responsibility.

Preferred:

10+ years designing and operating internet-facing networks at scale, proven experience with BGP/peering, multi-cloud networking, CDNs and network automation. Experience working with global teams, colocation providers and IXPs is highly preferred.