Ropes & Gray is a preeminent global law firm. The firm has been ranked in the top three on The American Lawyer's prestigious A-List for eight consecutive years and #1 on Law.com's UK A-List twice in the past three years—rankings that honor the "best of the best" law firms.

The firm has approximately 2,500 lawyers and professionals serving clients in major centers of business, finance, technology, and government in Boston, Chicago, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Tokyo and Washington, D.C.

The firm has consistently been recognized for its leading practices in many areas, including asset management, private equity, M&A, finance, real estate, tax, antitrust, life sciences, health care, intellectual property, litigation & enforcement, privacy & cybersecurity, and business restructuring.

Ropes & Gray is an equal opportunity employer.

This position is responsible for supporting the design and architecture of the firm's data, wireless, video, and VOIP networks, as well as cloud and IaaS based network connectivity.  The Network Architect approaches solution designs with a high level of ownership to deliver secure and operationally sound solutions. This role encompasses three key areas of focus: physical designs that illustrate how the network system integrates with the enterprise, logical/secure designs to meet defined solution requirements, and monitoring/measuring that validates the expected digital experience and business value. The Network Architect will make recommendations for emerging technologies. This position requires an active review of designs to ensure that all business requirements, technical requirements, and monitoring objectives are met. The Network Architect will collaborate across the network team and other IT stakeholder groups to propose security, scalability, availability, supportability, and cost improvements.  In addition, the Network Architect will provide technical guidance across the organization, from strategic decision advice down to the project planning level. 

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

• Contributes to the strategic design and architecture of the firm's data network environment.
• Contributes to the design, deployment, and maintenance of various network systems and components including: routers, switches, internet services, wide area network services, wireless networks, VPNs, firewalls, video networks and related infrastructure, VoIP network and related infrastructure, Security, and performance management and monitoring systems.
• Participate in physical build planning and design for new spaces.  Scope, recommend, design, plan, oversee and test inter-rack and station cabling for office, MDF, IDF and datacenter builds and refreshes.
• Configure networks to ensure their smooth and reliable operation for fulfilling business objectives and processes.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend purchase, development, or enhancement of network hardware and software.
• Recommends performance standards, processes, policies, and procedures.
• Provide senior level technical support for network elements and systems.

• Design and provide for the monitoring of network performance and troubleshoot problem areas as needed.
• Collaborate with executive management and department leaders to assess near and long-term network capacity needs.
• Create and maintain documentation as it relates to network architecture and network configuration.
• Assures knowledge transfer for new systems.
• Coordinate with other members of the firm for business continuity and disaster recovery programs.

OTHER RESPONSIBILITIES:

Performs other work-related duties as assigned.

EDUCATION, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS REQUIRED:          

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience
• 7+ years experience in network field
• Proven experience and success with planning, installing and managing networks including LAN, MAN, WAN, Optical Networking, Silverpeak SDWAN Optimizers, F5 Load Balancers, iRules, F5 Global Traffic Manager, Infoblox/BloxOne, Illumio, Checkpoint firewalls, Checkpoint Identity Collector, VPN, DMZ, IDS/IPS, Zscaler Web Proxy, content filter, NAC and Cisco ISE, Ciena DWDM, 100 Gig optics, DNS Traffic Control, Cisco ACI & NXOS, SDN, network segmentation, Cisco Catalyst center, Cisco CLI, ACL management, SNMP MIB’s, Aruba wireless controllers and AP’s, SSL certificate creation and management, DNS Domain registration, Citrix Netscaler, VMware NSX, network taps, Extrahop.
• Azure networking solutions including Virtual Network Peering, VPN Gateway, and ExpressRoute to support SaaS and cloud-based initiatives.
• Familiarity with IaC (infrastructure as code), ex. Ansible, Terraform, Azure Resource Manager, Chef.
• Familiarity with EntraID, Active Directory, LDAP, PKI, SAML, OAUTH, SSO.
• Network Monitoring and Tools (OpenView, Spectrum, NetScout, Gigamon, APCON, NetMRI, MRTG, CACTI, Solarwinds, SmokePing, NetFlow, Tufin, Splunk and syslog)
• Proven experience with network capacity planning, security principles, and general network management best practices and optimizations for performance.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of LAN/WAN/MAN protocols and technologies including Carrier Ethernet, T1, DS3, optical, DWDM, NTP, Spanning Tree, VLAN’s, 802.1q, VFR, LFA, , SNMP v1-v3, OSPF, BGP, MPLS, VPLS, SIP, H.323, QoS, Multicast, Anycast, 802.1x, Radius, TACACS+, SSH, NAC,  DHCP, DNS, F5 Wide-IP, VRRP, HSRP, GLBP, PBR, VPC, LACP, SGT, SGACL, SXP, VxLAN, OTP, LISP, SPAN, WCCP, PfR, IPSLA, iWAN, VPN, SIP, IPSec, WiFi 6, 6E, 7.
• Strong working knowledge of Cisco routers and switches (Nexus 9K, 7K, 5K, 2K, 1K;  Catalyst 9410, 9300; ISR-4451, 8300)
• Experience with fiberoptic cabling, patching, cleaning, and troubleshooting.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of DNS record creation: A, CNAME, TXT, SRV, NS and PTR.
• Experience with DNS SPF, DMARC and DKIM records.
• Racking and patching appliances and servers.
• Rack power management and monitoring, configuring managed PDUs.
• Experience with console servers for out-of-band serial access.
• Experience with DevOps, automating and scripting.
• Data Center, server room and IDF design; station cabling layout design and implementation; UPS management and monitoring and environmental monitoring systems.
• Preferred certifications: CCNA, CCNP, CCDE, CCDA, CCSP
• Strong verbal and interpersonal skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Strong customer service skills
• Strong team skills
• Strong leadership skills
• Strong project management skills

• Experience working in a multi-office environment.

ESSENTIAL CAPABILITIES:

• Must demonstrate the ability to maintain strict confidentiality of the firm's internal and personnel affairs.

• Ability to influence at all levels of the organization.
• Must be a self-starter who understands the details within a much larger content.
• Ability to work effectively in a culturally and educationally diverse environment.
• Ability to work in a teamwork/collaborative style and environment.
• Must be creative and flexible when responding quickly and positively to shifting demands and opportunities; ability to work under tight deadlines and handle multiple, detailed tasks.
• Must be a team-oriented person who can share information, goals, opportunities, successes, and failures with the appropriate parties.
• Ability to organize, plan and carry out multiple related activities.
• Must pay attention to details and be able to follow up and follow through.
• Ability to work effectively in a multi-office environment.

Ropes & Gray is proud to offer a comprehensive Total Rewards package to our business support team members. The firm also offers comprehensive health and well-being benefits, personal and professional development, career growth opportunities and a collegial and supportive culture. The anticipated pay range for this role is listed below and represents our good faith and reasonable estimate of the starting salary range at the time of posting. In addition, this role is eligible for a discretionary bonus based on performance. The actual offered rate for this position will be determined based on job-related, non-discriminatory factors, including qualifications and experience, geographic location, education, external market data and consideration of internal equity.

• Boston: $123,200 - $187,950
• New York: $129,100 - $196,900

This position requires hybrid on-site presence as an essential function of the role. Consistent and predictable on-site presence is required for ongoing business continuity, professional development and effective collaboration with colleagues and management.

Normal office environment.  Incumbent is expected to work the hours necessary to fulfill the responsibilities of the position. Become proficient with new and emerging technologies the firm integrates into our environment. Travel to firm sites and vendor conferences.