Job Title: Network Engineering Manager
Industry: Payments Technology / Fintech
Location: UK & Ireland
Salary: £100,000
Type: Permanent, Full-time

Our client, a high-growth, multi-national payments technology company, is building the next generation of capabilities to power its merchant-first ecosystem. They are looking for a "player-coach" Manager of Network Engineering to lead a team responsible for network architecture, design, administration, and troubleshooting across the enterprise, maintaining an internal SLA objective of five 9's in a 24/7 environment.

The Role:

• Provide senior Technical Operations leadership on design and standards issues, including training and mentoring
• Lead a team supporting system and network infrastructure including switches, routers, load balancers, firewalls, compute, storage, and virtualization
• Manage highly visible/risky changes and act as liaison between TechOps, Engineering, Architecture, and InfoSec
• Align network solutions and technologies with business and strategic plans
• Coordinate capacity planning, hardware tuning, and vendor/software upgrades
• Provide the CTO office with regular reports on network usage, security, and service levels
• Coordinate a comprehensive Network Disaster Recovery Plan and conduct periodic testing
• Attract, develop, and manage talent while staying hands-on in day-to-day operations

Skills Needed:

• 11+ years of relevant experience in Enterprise Network environments
• 6+ years of experience as a technical lead or architect
• Deep hands-on expertise with Cisco/Juniper/Palo Alto Networks WAN/LAN technologies
• Strong knowledge of VXLAN, BGP, and L4-L7 load balancer technologies
• Experience managing day-to-day data center operations
• Experience with network security, including NAC and certificate management
• Scripting experience (Bash/PowerShell/Perl/Python)

Benefits

• Player-coach leadership role combining people management with hands-on technical work
• Direct oversight of network architecture across a global enterprise
• High-visibility role reporting into the CTO office
• Opportunity to build and develop a high-performing engineering team
• Autonomous, empowered working culture with a strong focus on outcomes
• Exposure to large-scale, complex, multi-cloud infrastructure projects

Research indicates that men will apply to a role when they meet only 50–60% of the requirements, while women and other underrepresented groups often look for a 90–100% match. If this role excites you but you don't tick every single box, please still apply. We'd love to hear from you.