Network Security Engineer

Job Title - Network and Security Engineer (NOC)

Location - London/Hybrid ( 2 days a week in office located near Elephant and Castle)

Our client is looking for a hands-on senior technical leader to serve as the operational "anchor" for their managed network and security services. This role is perfect for a disciplined operator who enjoys technical troubleshooting as much as building the processes, runbooks, and "evidence by construction" required to run a reliable, modern service.

This is a senior-level position focused on raising operational maturity while coordinating closely across Product Engineering and Platform teams.

The Mission

• Incident Leadership: Act as the hands-on incident commander for priority events—driving triage, containment, and restoration while ensuring structured escalations to engineering teams.
• Operational Discipline: Own the execution of network and security changes, enforcing strict pre/post-check discipline and rollback readiness.
• Continuous Improvement: Establish a lightweight operating rhythm (daily triage, weekly problem reviews) to identify recurring issues and drive them to root-cause resolution.
• Knowledge Maturity: Build and maintain high-quality runbooks and "shift-left" training pathways to empower NOC engineers and improve team self-sufficiency.
• Observability & Automation: Partner with Platform teams to tune alerting, reduce "noise," and identify high-toil tasks that can be automated to improve reliability.

What Success Looks Like

In the first 6–12 months, you will drive a measurable uplift in operational stability, including:

• A reduction in Sev-1/Sev-2 and repeat incidents.
• Improved MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) through faster detection and better runbook coverage.
• A decreased change failure rate backed by consistent evidence and validation.
• A better signal-to-noise ratio where monitoring reflects reality and alerts are actionable.

Who You Are

You are a reliability-first professional who remains calm and decisive under pressure. You believe in a coaching mindset that raises the standards of everyone around you.

Core Requirements:

• Senior Operations Experience: Proven track record in a NOC or service operations environment for networked services (MSP, MSSP, ISP, or Telco).
• Technical Depth: Strong troubleshooting skills in IP networking and security (Routing/Switching, Firewalls, VPNs, NAT, DNS).
• Incident & Change Command: Experience leading high-pressure incident response and a disciplined approach to change governance.
• Communication: Ability to provide clear, factual updates to customers and detailed, evidence-based briefings to engineering.

Nice-to-Have:

• Technical depth in Fortinet/FortiGate or similar edge/DC vendor stacks.
• Operational experience with SD-WAN, SASE, or SSE.
• Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., Grafana) and automation concepts (Python/Ansible) to identify toil reduction opportunities.