Senior Network Engineer

Job Title: Senior Network Engineer

Location: Liverpool – Hybrid (3 days in the Liverpool office, 2 days from home)

Salary: £57,000 - £60,000 + benefits + on call (1 in 7)

About the Role

This is a Senior Network Engineer role supporting key public-sector clients, and most of the work is on Fortinet/FortiGate networks. The networks you’ll support carry hosted NHS, clinical and public-sector services run from data centres in Liverpool and Runcorn.

You’ll be based in their Network Operations Centre in Liverpool as the Tier 2 escalation point, in a team that also has Lead and Principal Network Engineers. Tier 1 escalates incidents to you, you take them through to resolution, and you pass the most complex issues up to Tier 3. Alongside the operational work you’ll deliver network changes, migrations and customer cutovers.

Key Responsibilities

Operational support

• You’ll handle incidents, problems and service requests escalated from Tier 1, keep accurate ticket records and update customers regularly.
• You’ll troubleshoot LAN, WAN, WLAN, firewall, VPN, SD-WAN and data-centre networking issues.
• During major incidents you’ll work with customers, vendors and internal teams to restore service.
• You’ll contribute to root-cause analysis and make sure corrective actions are recorded and completed.

Changes and projects

• You’ll deliver network deployments, data-centre changes, customer cutovers and upgrades under approved designs and change control.
• You’ll write and maintain HLDs, LLDs, implementation plans, test plans and rollback procedures.
• You’ll support customer onboarding and make sure new services are documented, monitored and handed over properly into operational support.

Team and service improvement

• You’ll mentor the Tier 1 engineers.
• You’ll help with capacity, lifecycle, firmware and vulnerability management.
• You’ll be on the on-call rota and will do some planned out-of-hours change work.

Experience Required

• Strong hands-on experience with Fortinet FortiGate and FortiManager.
• Good working knowledge of SD-WAN.
• Solid routing and switching skills, including BGP, OSPF, HSRP/VRRP, VLANs, spanning tree and 802.1X.
• A good understanding of firewall policy, NAT, VPN and network segmentation
• A methodical approach to troubleshooting and the ability to manage escalations under pressure.
• Working knowledge of ITIL incident, problem and change processes.

Desirable

• Experience supporting NHS, public-sector or other regulated customers.
• Knowledge of VXLAN, EVPN, fabric architectures or cloud networking.
• Network automation experience with Python, Ansible or APIs.
• Experience with PRTG, SolarWinds or LogicMonitor.
• Knowledge of ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus or NHS DSPT.

What’s on Offer

• A senior role in a FortiGate-heavy, multi-vendor estate. You’ll do both operational and project work rather than only handling tickets.
• A clear technical structure above you, with Lead and Principal Engineers to learn from and escalate to.
• Access to a Technical Training Academy, plus support to complete vendor accreditations.
• 25 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, holiday trading and your birthday off.
• A company pension with matched contributions, private medical insurance, life assurance and shares after 12 months.
• A health club and wellbeing scheme and an Employee Assistance Programme.