Lead Network Design Engineer (L3/3.5)

Network Architecture & Design 

• Design and govern enterprise network architectures across datacentres, public cloud and corporate environments. 

• Define standards, patterns and roadmaps for routing, switching, firewall, DNS and load balancing technologies. 

• Lead network design reviews, technical governance and architectural decision-making. 

• Design highly available and resilient network solutions supporting business-critical applications and customer-facing platforms. 

• Develop network standards covering segmentation, availability, performance and security. 

L3 / L3.5 Engineering & Technical Leadership 

• Act as a senior escalation point for complex network incidents and major service outages. 

• Perform deep root-cause analysis across LAN, WAN, cloud and security platforms. 

• Provide technical leadership during major incidents and high-risk infrastructure changes. 

• Lead troubleshooting activities across routing, switching, firewall, DNS and application delivery environments. 

• Mentor network engineers and support technical capability development across the team. 

Cloud & Hybrid Connectivity 

• Design and support network architectures within AWS, and some work in Azure environments. 

• Build and maintain secure hybrid connectivity between cloud platforms, datacentres and customer environments. 

• Design and support:  

• AWS VPCs 

• Transit Gateways 

• Route Tables 

• Direct Connect 

• Site-to-Site VPNs 

• Security Groups 

• Network ACLs 

• Support Azure networking including:  

• Virtual Networks 

• ExpressRoute 

• VPN Gateways 

• NSGs 

• Virtual WAN 

Security Engineering 

• Design, implement and maintain network security controls. 

• Govern firewall policies and segmentation strategies. 

• Support security initiatives including Zero Trust, segmentation and hybrid-cloud security architectures. 

• Partner with Security Operations teams to ensure secure and compliant networking services. 

AI & Automation Responsibilities 

A key objective of this role is driving the next generation of intelligent network operations. 

The engineer will: 

• Design and build AI-driven operational solutions. 

• Develop automation frameworks for network discovery, inventory management and topology mapping. 

• Use AI and machine learning techniques to improve:  

• Incident triage 

• Fault identification 

• Capacity forecasting 

• Configuration validation 

• Performance optimisation 

• Change impact assessment 

• Build automated network documentation and topology generation capabilities. 

• Develop predictive capacity and utilisation reporting. 

• Implement Infrastructure and Network as Code principles. 

• Leverage APIs, Python, Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell and AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and similar engineering platforms.