Network Team Lead

• Managing network IT BAU, Change and Service Request ticket queues, ensuring SLAs and met and work is allocated and prioritised accordingly.
• Day to day management of team, including on call rota, shift plans, holiday, training schedules and sick leave.
• Work with project managers to allocate network resources.
• Ensure the network team complete mandatory internal training.
• Conduct daily stand-up meetings with the team.
• Deliver positive leadership, mentoring and development of all team members delivering a collaborative and cohesive working environment
• 1-2-1 meetings with staff to review performance and support professional growth.
• Act as an escalation point for all network related issues.
• Accountable for Paragon’s network boundary and security systems covering IDS/IPS, Advanced threat prevention, Web content filtering, DNS protection, and DLP
• Management and Configuration of all network devices in line with industry best practices and regulatory controls across routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, VPN and Wi-fi.
• Monitor network performance and ensure system availability and reliability.
• Resolve network issues escalated by ticket or direct notification
• Automate tasks and monitor their effectiveness.
• Escalation management, 3rd line support, and development of the Paragon Global network
• Create, oversee, and test security measures (e.g. access authentication and disaster recovery).
• Create, update and maintain complete technical documentation.
• Suggest improvements to network performance, capacity, and scalability.
• Required to perform out of hours work upon agreement and will be part of an on-call rota for Incident support and resolution
• Perform system maintenance, patching and updates ensuring compliance with Paragon’s security policies and controls.
• May be required to travel to site (Paragon or Client)

Competencies

• Technical Expertise – Advanced Formal training or equivalent experience in Networking systems design, configuration and support
• Relationship Management - Able to communicate clearly and concisely to both technical and non-technical personnel. This may include contact with Paragon’s clients.
• Able to deliver a clear message instilling confidence in the Technology team to deliver results. Able to demonstrate good written and verbal communication, influencing and negotiation skills
• Customer Management - Able to work with internal and external customers to establish/validate requirements. Understands that colleagues in the business are customers and adopts a Service Excellence ethos. Able to communicate effectively with non-technical staff
• Quality Management - Understands Paragon’s Quality policy and able to follow standard operating procedures
• Change Management – Understands and adheres fully to Paragon’s Change Management procedure
• Project Management – Understands the Paragon Technology Project methodology and complies with standards set. Communicates in a timely manner on any assigned actions, risks, issues and dependencies. Defines, documents and carries out service improvements within the Paragon network.
• ITIL – Foundation course completed, understands and follows ITIL practices and procedures
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team with excellent organisational and mentoring skills.

Skills

• 5 years' experience in a management or senior position.
• Expert knowledge of routing protocols, including BGP, OSPF and EIGRP.
• Extensive experience with campus networking technologies (Cisco, Juniper and HP).
• Strong expertise in wireless networking (Meraki and Ruckus).
• In-depth experience with datacentre networking, including Cisco Nexus and NDFC, Arista CloudVision, EVPN VXLAN, and Juniper/Cisco routing platforms.
• Advanced knowledge of IPsec VPN technologies.
• Extensive experience in designing and configuring Palo Alto firewalls.
• Additional experience with Cisco ASA, Fortinet and Juniper SRX firewalls.
• Strong background in load balancing and WAF technologies (F5, Kemp and Imperva).
• Hands-on experience with network management and monitoring tools such as SolarWinds, NetBox, Cisco ISE and Zabbix.
• Experience in network automation, particularly with Ansible and Python, would be highly advantageous.
• Public cloud networking experience across Azure, Oracle Cloud, Megaport and AWS.
• Experience with Arista Velocloud SD‑WAN (highly desirable).
• Experience supporting PCI-compliant environments.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Network Team Lead.
• CCNP Certified, CCIE/CCDP is highly desirable.
• Palo Alto, AWS and Azue certifications highly desirable.
• BSc/BA in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.