Lead Network Operations Engineer

Lead Network Operations Engineer | Systematic Hedge Fund (50% Work From Home)

A leading systematic hedge fund is seeking a Lead Network Operations Engineer to join its Core Infrastructure team, responsible for the availability, performance, and security of the network platforms supporting the firm's global research and trading environments.

Technology is a fundamental competitive advantage across the business, with continued investment into automation, AI, observability, and next-generation infrastructure. As the platform continues to scale, the team is evolving towards a modern, software-driven operating model with a strong focus on automation, operational excellence, and proactive network reliability.

This is a technical leadership role rather than a people management position, offering the opportunity to shape operational processes, influence technical direction, and drive continual improvements across a large-scale enterprise network estate. Approximately 60% of your time will remain hands-on engineering, with the remainder focused on technical leadership, operational maturity, automation strategy, and improving the effectiveness of the wider function

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The Role

• Take technical ownership of the operational health, availability, performance, and security of the firm's core network infrastructure across datacentre, WAN, campus, and internet services
• Lead the day-to-day operational function, ensuring high service levels while driving continual improvements across tooling, processes, and operational workflows
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for complex networking and security incidents, performing root cause analysis and implementing long-term engineering solutions
• Drive an automation-first approach across network operations, reducing operational toil and improving platform reliability through automation and AI-enabled workflows
• Enhance monitoring, telemetry, and observability capabilities to proactively identify issues before they impact production services
• Partner closely with Network Engineering to ensure new platforms are designed with operational excellence, resilience, and maintainability in mind
• Lead continual improvement initiatives across incident management, change processes, operational standards, and service reliability
• Support the evolution of a large-scale network estate while helping simplify legacy configurations and reduce technical debt
• Contribute to major infrastructure programmes, including datacentre expansion and core network modernisation
• Participate in a shared on-call rota supporting business-critical infrastructure

Requirements

• Strong experience within Network Operations and Reliability environments
• Excellent routing and switching knowledge across Arista and/or Cisco platforms
• Strong understanding of BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, and modern datacentre networking
• Pro-automation mindset - previous exposure to Python, Ansible, or Infrastructure-as-Code tooling
• Hands-on experience supporting enterprise network security technologies, ideally Palo Alto and/or Fortinet firewalls
• Experience with enterprise proxy technologies such as Blue Coat or FortiProxy
• Strong troubleshooting skills across complex production network environments
• Experience working within highly automated infrastructure environments with a strong appreciation for automation, Infrastructure-as-Code, and AI-assisted operations
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, Kubernetes, or similar tooling
• Previous hands on leadership experience would be beneficial but is by no means essential

Company Highlights

• Technology-led culture where engineering is viewed as a competitive advantage rather than a support function
• Significant investment across networking, automation, AI, and platform engineering, creating a strong pipeline of strategic infrastructure projects
• Opportunity to influence the operational maturity of one of the industry's most sophisticated network environments
• Highly automated engineering culture with a strong focus on observability, software-defined infrastructure, and continuous improvement
• Genuine ownership with the opportunity to shape operational strategy, tooling, and long-term technical direction
• Collaborative environment with close interaction between Network Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, and Software Engineering teams
• Excellent work-life balance, including a flexible hybrid working model
• Strong compensation and comprehensive benefits package including extensive annual leave allowance, free daily lunch, comprehensive healthcare, life assurance, and more
• Strong Work from Home flexibility