Senior Network Engineer at Avacone

Description

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.