Network Team Lead

Network Team Lead

Location: Bolton/Manchester 2-3 Days Per Week

Contract Length : Three Months

Rate: £450 - £500 per day Inside IR35

I am working with a fast-growing IT consultancy who are quickly developing a strong reputation by helping organisations accelerate their digital transformations through expert delivery across cloud, AI, software engineering and enterprise technology.

They combine strategic consultancy with hands on technical expertise and partner with clients to solve complex challenges and deliver scalable solutions. They are now looking for a Network Team Lead to join them on a Three-month contract.

Role Overview

The Network Team Lead is a hands-on technical leadership role responsible for maintaining, supporting, and delivering network services across the organisation. The role leads a small team of engineers while actively contributing across BAU support, project delivery, and operational improvement.

The position focuses on ensuring stable, secure, and high-performing networking across sites, warehouses, offices, and cloud environments, while also providing practical input into network strategy and future direction.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership (Hands-on)

Act as the senior technical escalation point for network issues.
Lead from the front in troubleshooting, incident resolution, and root cause analysis.
Contribute directly to configuration, implementation, and support across all network platforms.
Maintain and evolve technical standards, ensuring consistency and reliability.
Provide informed input into network design decisions and future improvements, based on operational experience.

Team Leadership

Lead and support a small team of network engineers.
Allocate workload across BAU, and incident support.
Provide day-to-day technical guidance and mentoring.
Ensure strong team performance and accountability.

Operational Delivery

Support and maintain LAN, WAN, WiFi, and firewall infrastructure across all locations.
Ensure services remain highly available and performant.
Drive improvements in monitoring, alerting, and proactive issue detection.
Contribute to incident, problem, and change management processes.

Project Delivery

Deliver network components for infrastructure and business projects.
Support site rollouts, upgrades, and expansions.
Work closely with other infrastructure and security teams to deliver integrated solutions.
Remain actively involved in engineering and implementation work.

Security & Networking Controls

Support secure network design and access controls across the estate.
Contribute to segmentation and access improvement initiatives.
Ensure consistent and secure configuration of network devices.

Supplier & Partner Management

Work with third-party suppliers and service providers to support network services.
Assist with escalation management, service reviews, and issue resolution with partners.
Provide technical oversight of supplier-delivered work and ensure alignment with internal standards.
Support procurement and evaluation of network technologies where required.

Technical Scope

Enterprise LAN/WAN (routing and switching)
Wireless networking (Juniper Mist)
Firewall technologies (Fortinet)
Cloud networking (AWS VPC design, Azure connectivity, routing, and hybrid networking)
Network monitoring and observability tooling
Network access and segmentation approaches

Additional Requirements

Participation in an on-call rota to support out-of-hours incidents.
Travel to sites required to support project delivery, major incidents (P1), and key network changes.
Ability to operate effectively across both BAU support and project delivery.

Skills & Experience

Essential

Strong hands-on experience across enterprise networking (LAN, WAN, WiFi, firewalls)
Experience with Fortinet firewall administration and troubleshooting
Strong working knowledge of AWS networking, including VPCs, routing, security groups, and hybrid connectivity
Proven ability to support and guide engineers within a technical team
Strong troubleshooting and incident management capability
Experience in multi-site environments (warehouses, offices, remote users)
Experience working with third-party suppliers or managed service providers

Desirable

Experience with network segmentation or access control solutions
Exposure to network automation or scripting
Certifications such as CCNP, JNCIP, AWS networking, NSE (Fortinet), or equivalent

Key Outcomes / Success Measures

Stable and reliable network services across all locations
Effective handling of incidents with reduced resolution times
Successful delivery of network elements within projects
Improved operational visibility and proactive issue management
Strong engagement with suppliers and consistent service delivery
A capable, supported, and well-performing network team

ECS Recruitment Group Ltd is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy