Lead Network Operations Engineer

In this role, you will own the reliability, performance, and security of the organisation’s network across datacentre and office environments. You’ll drive automation, observability, and incident response to reduce toil and improve service quality. Collaborating with engineering teams, you will help scale and secure our infrastructure to support world‑class research platforms. This position offers hands-on technical leadership with a focus on operational excellence and long‑term fixes that raise resilience and security.

• Highly competitive compensation plus annual discretionary bonus
• Lunch provided via Just Eat for Business
• 30 days' annual leave
• 9% company pension contributions
• Comprehensive healthcare and life assurance
• Cycle-to-work scheme

• Own day-to-day performance, stability, availability, and security of network platforms across datacentre, WAN, and campus environments
• Lead incident response and drive rapid diagnosis, containment, and remediation
• Champion automation-first approaches, tooling, observability, and emerging technologies (including agentic AI)
• Develop operational tooling, runbooks, and incident frameworks for consistent service delivery
• Support an event-driven network architecture aligned with Infrastructure as Code
• Enhance observability through telemetry, alerting, and performance monitoring
• Partner with Network and Security Engineering to ensure designs meet standards
• Drive continuous improvements for efficiency, reliability, and scalability
• Identify systemic issues via incident analysis and implement long-term fixes
• Support capacity planning, performance optimisation, and readiness for changes/upgrades

• Hands-on networking operations experience in enterprise or large-scale environments (datacentre, WAN, campus)
• Experience operating network security infrastructure (firewalls, load balancers, proxies, TACACS)
• Strong knowledge of switching/routing (Cisco/Arista, L2/L3) and routing protocols (BGP, EVPN-VXLAN)
• Understanding of modern network security principles (zero trust, micro-segmentation)
• Experience managing physical network circuits and vendor relationships
• Familiarity with automation and CI/CD tooling (Ansible, Python, Jenkins) and Infrastructure as Code
• Experience with observability/monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK)
• Strong ability to analyse and troubleshoot distributed systems end-to-end
• Proactive, self-starting mindset with ownership
• Stakeholder engagement across infrastructure and application teams

• Proactive ownership
• Collaborative mindset
• Strong communication
• Networking operations in enterprise/large-scale environments
• Network security infrastructure (firewalls, load balancers, proxies, TACACS)
• Switching/Routing (Cisco/Arista) and BGP EVPN-VXLAN