Senior Technical Advisor, Network Resilience

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Please note this role will close at 00:01 on Tuesday 2nd April and therefore we advise getting your application in no later than midnight on Monday 1st April.

About the team you’ll be part of

This role sits within Ofcom’s Network and Communications Technology Team (N&C Tech). The N&C Tech team in Ofcom includes technologists across the areas of network infrastructure, resilience, and security topics, and range of wireless and wireline technology contexts. The team supports initiatives across the rest of Ofcom as well as having its own objectives in the areas of ensuring reliable and secure networks and communications services in the UK.

The N&C Tech team are a part of the Network and Communications Groups, with responsibilities in telecoms, postal sectors and digital markets. The N&C Group sits alongside other directorates including: Spectrum, Broadcasting and Media, Online Safety, Strategy, Economics, and Legal.

The Purpose of the Role

As society has become increasingly dependent on communications services, and telecommunications technologies and infrastructure continue to change at a rapid pace, Ofcom needs technical expertise and market experience in the telecommunications industry in order to support Ofcom in its policy work as well as monitoring the state of play in the industry as well as individual communications providers.

The purpose of this role (Senior Technical Advisor, Network Resilience) is to help maintain and improve the reliability of communications networks and services in the UK by using your technical expertise to support Ofcom’s colleagues from all the other directorates in achieving our goals together.

Your Key Responsibilities

The successful candidate will be able to demonstrate and communicate technical insights to non-technical people, help develop and write guidance documentation on these topics so that Ofcom’s communications network & service resilience regulation is effective, appropriate, and measurable.

The focus of this role is to improve adoption of architecture & design ‘good practice’ measures for telecommunications network infrastructure & service providers with the aim of achieving appropriate levels of reliability. A mix of pro-active assessment and re-active incident assessment will require a fairly broad technical understanding across: fixed, mobile, voice/VoIP/IMS, and IP/MPLS/transport networks & services. The role includes keeping up to date with new technology evolution and implementations, to update guidance for communications providers, and assess whether they have built their networks & services in a robust, reliable, and secure way.

Working alongside other members of the N&C Tech team, you will be key in supporting the roll out of a Network Resilience assurance programme to ensure that Communications Providers follow good network architecture & design practices for service availability & reliability.

This role will require you to provide technical expertise and help continue to evolve Ofcom’s guidance on network technologies & resilience mechanisms, network topologies, operations, and processes. This is in support of Ofcom’s policy work so that the regulation of Network Resilience is effective and appropriate to end user needs and expectations, ensuring that they can benefit from new technology innovation in communications delivering a wide range of consumer and business services.

You will also have the opportunity to collaborate across other areas of Ofcom, such as market research, to ensure our insights and evaluation are consistent with Ofcom’s wider work.

What you’ll need to be successful in this role

Technical Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Whilst some telecoms technologies are long established, new & innovative technologies continue to emerge. The way these new technologies are configured & managed also continues to evolve to match the increasing consumer demand for broadband capacity and a better quality of experience. These include the rollout of fibre & other gigabit-capable technologies, wireless access networks (both 3GPP & non-3GPP-based), transition from PSTN to VoBB/VoLTE/VoNR and other IP telephony services, evolution of network functions to virtualised cloud-native architectures, and a wide range of software defined/controlled & automated network elements.

Essential Skills/Experience

Technical knowledge and experience

Communication and team working skills

Desirable Skills/Experience

Qualifications and Accreditations

Ofcom is a forward-thinking, inclusive employer and recognises the value of diversity to truly make communications work for everyone. Our vision is to ensure Ofcom is a place where our people can work hard and be themselves. We aim to recruit from the widest pool of candidates possible – no matter your social background, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, or disability. We strive to be representative of the whole of the UK and our aim is to be an employer of choice for everyone.
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