Network Lead

Network Competence Center Lead

Freelance Contract · 12 Months · Brussels, Belgium · Aviation Sector

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Network Competence Center Lead to join a major aviation-sector organisation in Brussels on a one-year freelance contract. This is a hands-on leadership role for a network professional who combines strong technical expertise with the ability to guide a team, manage stakeholders, and keep critical network infrastructure running smoothly in a large, mission-critical environment.

What You Will Do

• Lead, support and develop a team of network engineers.
• Allocate and prioritise operational, project and support activities across the team.
• Provide technical leadership and act as an escalation point for complex network incidents.
• Remain hands-on with the configuration, support and troubleshooting of network infrastructure.
• Support and maintain Cisco switches, routers and associated network technologies.
• Manage and troubleshoot Palo Alto and Check Point firewall environments.
• Support site-to-site and remote-access VPN services.
• Diagnose network performance, connectivity, routing and security issues.
• Support Web Proxy infrastructure and external-facing services.
• Lead the technical response to major network incidents and service outages.
• Review and approve network changes, ensuring proper testing, risk assessment and rollback plans.
• Collaborate with security, infrastructure, cloud, service management and application teams.
• Ensure network configurations, diagrams, standards and procedures are documented and up to date.
• Identify opportunities to improve network resilience, security, performance and efficiency.
• Support network upgrades, migrations, hardware replacements and infrastructure projects.
• Monitor team performance, provide coaching and contribute to technical development plans.
• Ensure incidents, problems and service requests are managed within agreed service levels.
• Liaise with vendors and support partners to resolve hardware, software or service issues.
• Participate in an on-call or out-of-hours support rota where required.

What You Bring

• Proven experience supporting enterprise network environments, including leading, supervising or mentoring network engineers.
• Hands-on expertise with Cisco switching and routing technologies (VLANs, spanning tree, trunking, subnetting, dynamic routing protocols).
• Hands-on experience with Check Point and Palo Alto firewalls, and proxy appliances such as Bluecoat.
• Experience with Cloudflare and with site-to-site / remote-access VPN configuration and troubleshooting.
• Solid understanding of network security principles, firewall policies, NAT and access control.
• Experience troubleshooting complex incidents across LAN, WAN, firewall and VPN environments.
• Experience managing network changes within a controlled change-management process.
• Ability to lead technical investigations and communicate clearly during major incidents.
• Strong documentation and stakeholder-management skills, including at CXO level.
• Experience working in a large, multi-site or highly regulated organisation.
• Familiarity with Cisco Catalyst, Nexus, ISR or ASR platforms.
• Experience with network monitoring and configuration-management tools.
• Knowledge of wireless networking and Cisco wireless technologies.
• Experience with cloud networking (Azure, AWS or GCP) is a plus.
• Familiarity with software-defined networking, network automation or infrastructure-as-code is a plus.
• Experience working within ITIL-based service-management environments.
• Excellent knowledge of ITIL / ITSM standards, with hands-on experience setting up ITIL-driven support and maintenance delivery in large organisations.
• Strong emotional intelligence, consultancy mindset and ability to translate complex ideas into clear, actionable concepts.
• Comfortable working in a multinational, multicultural environment.
• Relevant certifications such as Cisco CCNP and/or Check Point CCSA/CCSE are highly valued.
• A Master's degree (4-year university studies) in Computer Science, IT or a related field is a plus.

Contract Details

• Type: Freelance / independent contractor
• Duration: 12 months (with possible extension)
• Location: Brussels, Belgium (hybrid 50%)
• Sector: Aviation / air-traffic infrastructure
• Start: Sep 2026