Role Overview
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Network Engineer to join our technology infrastructure team in London. This role requires a strong hands-on engineer with deep technical expertise in designing, implementing, maintaining, and troubleshooting complex enterprise network environments within a highly regulated banking environment.
The successful candidate will play a critical role in ensuring the resilience, security, and performance of network services supporting business-critical banking operations, trading systems, data centres, cloud connectivity, and branch infrastructure.
This position is ideal for an engineer who combines strong architectural understanding with a practical delivery mindset and who remains technically engaged in day-to-day operational activities.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, implement and support enterprise-grade network infrastructure across on-premise and cloud environments
- Manage and optimise LAN, WAN, WLAN, and data centre network environments
- Perform advanced troubleshooting across routing, switching, firewall, VPN, and load balancing technologies
- Lead hands-on incident resolution for complex network outages and performance issues
- Maintain secure connectivity between data centres, branch offices, cloud platforms, and third-party providers
- Support network segmentation, resilience, redundancy and disaster recovery design
- Implement and maintain network monitoring, alerting and performance analysis tools
- Collaborate closely with cyber security, infrastructure, cloud, and application teams
- Support change management, release activities, and technical documentation in line with banking governance standards
- Participate in on-call support for critical production incidents when required
- Ensure all network solutions comply with internal security standards, audit requirements, and regulatory expectations
Requirements
Required Technical Skills
- Strong hands-on experience with Cisco routing and switching in enterprise environments
- Deep expertise in BGP, OSPF, MPLS, VLANs, STP, HSRP, VRRP
- Strong practical experience with Palo Alto Networks firewalls, VPN technologies, and security policies
- Experience with load balancers such as F5 Networks
- Strong knowledge of network security controls, segmentation, NAC, and secure remote access
- Experience with cloud networking in Amazon Web Services and/or Microsoft
- Hands-on experience with network monitoring tools such as SolarWinds, PRTG, or similar
- Experience in data centre networking and high-availability environments
- Strong troubleshooting capability at packet level using tools such as Wireshark
- Good scripting capability in Python, Bash, or automation tooling is advantageous
Required Experience
- Minimum 8 to 10 years of network engineering experience in complex enterprise environments
- Proven experience within banking, financial services, or other highly regulated industries
- Strong operational experience in mission-critical production environments
- Demonstrated ability to work directly on live infrastructure with minimal supervision
- Experience supporting audit, compliance, and regulated change environments
Preferred Qualifications
- Cisco certifications such as CCNP or CCIE
- Palo Alto certification preferred
- Experience with hybrid cloud connectivity and SD-WAN
- Exposure to zero trust networking principles
Personal Profile
- Strong ownership mentality and accountability
- Calm under pressure during production incidents
- Highly practical, solution-oriented and detail-focused
- Able to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Comfortable operating in a fast-paced banking environment
Important Note
This role requires a genuinely hands-on engineer. Candidates with primarily managerial or purely architectural backgrounds without recent operational delivery experience will not be considered.
