Senior Network Engineer

Job Title: Senior Network Engineer

Location: Liverpool (Hybrid)

Salary: Up to £60,000 DOE

Contract type: Permanent

Join ARO's Specialist Data Services (SDS) team and play a key role in supporting and evolving the network infrastructure that underpins critical NHS, healthcare and public-sector services across the UK.

We're looking for an experienced Senior Network Engineer to provide technical expertise across a complex, enterprise-scale environment spanning data centre networks, WAN, SD-WAN, security, and customer connectivity solutions. This is an exciting opportunity to work with industry-leading technologies, including the Fortinet security stack, with significant exposure to FortiGate, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer within highly resilient and security-focused environments.

As a Senior Network Engineer, you'll act as a key technical escalation point within the SDS networking team, taking ownership of complex incidents, service requests and infrastructure challenges through to resolution. Working closely with Lead and Principal Network Engineers, you'll contribute to major incident management, network improvement initiatives, customer onboarding projects, infrastructure upgrades and service transformation activities, helping to ensure the performance, availability and security of business-critical services.

The role offers a balance of operational support, project delivery and continuous improvement, providing the opportunity to work on everything from troubleshooting complex network issues to implementing new customer solutions and enhancing existing platforms. You'll be part of a collaborative team that values technical excellence, innovation and professional development, with opportunities to further develop your expertise in Fortinet technologies and enterprise networking.

Based primarily within our Liverpool Network Operations Centre, this hybrid role combines three days in the office with two days working remotely, alongside occasional visits to our Runcorn data centre and customer sites as required.

What You'll Do

• Act as a senior technical escalation point for complex network incidents, service requests and infrastructure issues across SDS-managed customer and hosted environments
• Support and develop enterprise networking solutions spanning data centre, WAN, SD-WAN, security and customer connectivity services
• Manage, support and configure network infrastructure, with a strong focus on the Fortinet ecosystem including FortiGate, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer
• Lead the investigation and resolution of complex networking issues, ensuring accurate documentation, effective communication and timely resolution
• Support major incident response activities, working collaboratively with customers, vendors and internal teams to restore critical services
• Deliver network deployments, upgrades, migrations and customer onboarding projects in line with approved designs and change controls
• Work closely with Lead and Principal Network Engineers to implement technical standards, improve network resilience and evolve service architecture
• Produce and maintain high-quality technical documentation, including high-level and low-level designs, implementation plans, test plans and rollback procedures
• Contribute to project planning, technical design reviews, testing and successful delivery of network and infrastructure initiatives
• Perform root cause analysis on service-impacting incidents and support the implementation of preventative and corrective actions
• Support lifecycle management activities, including firmware upgrades, vulnerability remediation, capacity planning and technical risk reduction
• Identify opportunities to enhance network performance, security, automation, monitoring and operational efficiency
• Ensure new and updated services are fully documented, monitored and successfully transitioned into operational support
• Build strong working relationships with customers, colleagues, technology partners and vendors across NHS, healthcare and public-sector environments
• Mentor Tier 1 engineers and share technical knowledge to support team development and growth
• Maintain and develop technical expertise through training, certifications and hands-on experience with emerging technologies
• Participate in the on-call rota and support planned out-of-hours activities where required

Requirements

Essential

• Proven experience in a Network Engineer, Senior Network Engineer or equivalent role
• Strong troubleshooting and operational support experience across LAN, WAN, VPN, WLAN and data centre networking technologies
• Hands-on experience administering and supporting Fortinet network and security solutions, including FortiGate, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer
• Experience managing firewall policies, VPNs, network security controls and troubleshooting complex connectivity issues
• Knowledge and experience of SD-WAN technologies and multi-site network environments
• Experience supporting highly available, resilient and secure network infrastructure
• Ability to investigate, troubleshoot and resolve complex incidents and service-impacting issues
• Experience working within structured change management and ITIL-based environments
• Strong documentation skills, including network diagrams, design documentation, implementation plans and operational procedures
• Experience working with customers, vendors and internal stakeholders in a service-focused environment
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and root cause analysis skills

Desirable

• Experience supporting NHS, clinical, public-sector or other regulated environments, ideally within hosted data centre or managed service environments
• Knowledge of VXLAN, EVPN, spine-and-leaf or fabric-based network architectures
• Experience with cloud networking technologies and hybrid connectivity solutions
• Experience with network automation using Python, Ansible, APIs or infrastructure-as-code approaches…