Specialist Engineer - Networks

The Senior Specialist Engineer - Networks, is a senior technical role responsible for delivering and maintaining excellence across the network infrastructure estate. The post holder acts as a subject matter expert and network architect, driving the design and evolution of the network environment, providing expert-level technical leadership during major incidents, and working across multi-disciplinary teams to ensure network services underpin the organisation's operational and scientific mission.

Working alongside the Network Manager, the post holder ensures all systems are optimally configured, resilient, secure, and performant. Beyond day-to-day operational responsibilities, the role carries explicit accountability for network architecture, strategic design, and cross-functional incident response., Own and maintain a comprehensive and current understanding of the network architecture, acting as an authoritative technical reference for network design decisions.

Maintain consistent availability and performance across specialist network systems, collaborating with other specialist engineers and ICT colleagues as required. Act as a primary network technical authority during major incidents, coordinating resolution activity across multi-disciplinary teams including infrastructure, security, application, and service management functions. Act as a technical point of expertise, providing advice, guidance, and training to improve and enhance services for end users.

Support the Network Team in ensuring hardware, software, and associated technologies are designed, procured, and delivered efficiently and cost-effectively. Contribute to and lead the production of network architecture documentation, including High Level Designs (HLD), Low Level Designs (LLD), and As-Built records., Network Architecture, Design & Delivery Act as the senior technical lead for UKHSA network architecture, owning and maintaining High Level Designs (HLD), Low Level Designs (LLD), topology diagrams and As-Built documentation.

Lead the design, implementation and lifecycle management of resilient, scalable and secure LAN, WAN, WLAN and cloud-connected infrastructure, ensuring alignment with NCSC Secure by Design principles. Provide technical assurance across estate modernisation, science campus, data centre and hybrid cloud programmes, while collaborating with infrastructure, security, application and cloud teams. Manage routing, switching, wireless, WAN, load balancing, IPAM, DNS and DHCP services, alongside Extreme Networks Fabric Engine, Site Engine and wireless platforms.

Network Security, Resilience & Incident Management Provide technical leadership for network security and operational resilience across the UKHSA estate. Administer Palo Alto NGFW, Panorama, VPN, micro-segmentation, DMZ and Zero Trust architectures, ensuring compliance with security standards and evolving threat landscapes. Act as the senior network authority during Major Incident Response Team (MIRT) activities, leading diagnosis, resolution, communication, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Post Incident Reviews (PIR).

Develop incident runbooks, continuity plans and mitigation strategies to reduce risk, improve service resilience and support secure cloud and on-premises environments. Service Management, Automation & Technical Leadership Lead the monitoring, observability, performance and capacity management of network services, integrating operational and security monitoring with ITSM and SIEM platforms. Drive network automation and Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Ansible and Python to improve consistency and efficiency.

Manage vendor relationships, technology lifecycles, procurement planning and proof-of-concept evaluations. Produce technical documentation, support ITIL Incident, Problem, Change and Request Management processes, contribute to CAB activities, mentor engineers, provide expert stakeholder advice, maintain compliance with ICT standards and deliver high-quality customer su