Network Team Lead

Location: Bolton/Manchester 2-3 Days Per Week

Contract Length : Three Months

Rate: £450 - £500 per day Inside IR35

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• 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.