Telecommunications Technical Authority
Sword is a leading provider of business technology solutions within the Energy, Public and Finance Sectors, driving transformational change within our clients. We use proven technology, specialist teams and domain expertise to build solid technical foundations across platforms, data, and business applications. We have a passion for using technology to solve business problems, working in partnership with our clients to help in achieving their goals.
About the role:
As a Telecommunications Technical Authority, you’ll play a key role in a major transformation programme, supporting the transition from legacy PSTN/ISDN services to resilient, future-ready IP and SIP-based solutions.
This is a highly visible role where you’ll act as the technical authority across a complex, multi-site estate. You’ll work closely with delivery partners and stakeholders to understand the current landscape, define robust future-state architectures, and guide structured migration plans that maintain operational continuity and safety-critical services.
You’ll be part of a collaborative and supportive environment, working alongside experienced teams across infrastructure, security, and operations. This is an opportunity to shape telecommunications strategy at scale—bringing best practice, influencing design decisions, and ensuring solutions are both practical and resilient.
As a Telecommunications Technical Authority, you will:
- Build and validate a comprehensive inventory of telephony assets across multiple sites, ensuring accuracy of existing data and identifying any gaps or risks.
- Assess lifecycle status, supportability, and regulatory exposure across the estate, highlighting operational and safety considerations.
- Define standardised IP/SIP-based architectures covering operational telephony, safety systems, control room environments, and cloud-based solutions such as Teams.
- Align telecommunications designs with wider network, OT, cyber security, and resilience principles.
- Develop clear dial plans and numbering strategies to support the future estate.
- Create structured, site-by-site migration roadmaps aligned to investment plans and business priorities.
- Plan and oversee transitions including ISDN to SIP migration, PSTN retirement, PBX replacement or consolidation, and DDI migration to cloud platforms.
- Produce detailed migration runbooks and fallback strategies to ensure continuity of service.
- Act as the technical design authority, reviewing and challenging third-party designs and ensuring alignment with best practice.
- Ensure quality of service, resilience, failover, and safety compliance are embedded into all solutions.
- Support the delivery of change while maintaining availability of operational and safety-critical services.
- Produce clear and maintainable documentation including architecture standards, inventories, and resilience models.
- Contribute to knowledge sharing and support internal teams to build long-term capability.
Requirements
- Extensive experience working within enterprise or industrial telecommunications environments.
- Proven experience delivering PSTN/ISDN retirement or transformation programmes.
- Hands-on experience with Avaya and/or Mitel systems, including migration and administration.
- Strong understanding of SIP trunking, session border controllers (SBCs), and carrier migration processes.
- Knowledge of VoIP networking principles including QoS, VLANs, and failover design.
- Experience working within regulated or safety-critical environments.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to engage both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
It would be great if you also had:
- Experience within energy, utilities, oil & gas, or similar industrial environments.
- Exposure to Microsoft Teams telephony (Direct Routing or Operator Connect).
- Experience supporting control room or emergency telephony systems.
- Understanding of resilience frameworks, NIS2, or safety compliance standards.
Benefits
At Sword, our core values and culture are based on caring about our people, investing in training and career development, and building inclusive teams where we are all encouraged to contribute to achieve success. We offer comprehensive benefits designed to support your professional development and enhance your overall quality of life. In addition to a Competitive Salary, here's what you can expect as part of our benefits package:
- Personalised Career Development: We create a development plan customised to your goals and aspirations, with a range of learning and development opportunities within a culture that encourages growth.
- Flexible working: Flexible work arrangements to support your work-life balance. We can’t promise to always be able to meet every request, however, are keen to discuss your individual preferences to make it work where we can.
- A Fantastic Benefits Package: This includes generous annual leave allowance, enhanced family friendly benefits, pension scheme, access to private health, well-being, and insurance schemes.
At Sword we are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace and are proud to be an equal opportunities employer, ensuring that all applicants receive fair and equal consideration for employment, regardless of whether they meet every requirement. If you don’t tick all the boxes but feel you have some of the relevant skills and experience we’re looking for, please do consider applying and highlight your transferable skills and experience. We embrace diversity in all its forms, valuing individuals regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity status, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation. Your perspective and potential are important to us.
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