Senior Network Engineer

Senior Network Engineer – Contract

Manchester (2-3 days/week onsite) | £500/day, Outside IR35 | 5-month contract

We're looking for a hands-on Senior Network Engineer to take ownership of the corporate network end to end across every site: switching, routing, wireless, firewalls, VPN and inter-site connectivity.

This is a genuine full-stack role for someone who thinks network-first but is equally comfortable making routine changes across the wider estate, and who's calm and methodical when things go wrong.

What you'll need:

• Expert-level network engineering: enterprise switching and routing, BGP and OSPF, firewalls (Palo Alto, Fortinet, Aruba, Junos, Arista or similar), wireless and VPN, CCNP-calibre as a guide
• Experience designing and securing multi-site networks, ideally moving high volumes of data between locations
• A true full-stack grounding: comfortable making routine changes across Windows/domain, identity, cloud and endpoint
• Confidence with network automation and infrastructure-as-code, using Python, Ansible or Terraform
• Cloud networking exposure across GCP, Azure or AWS
• A calm, methodical approach under pressure during outages, with strong root-cause discipline
• Confidence operating independently in a low-documentation, fast-changing environment

Nice to have:

• Background in games, VFX, animation or another technical creative studio environment
• Familiarity with Perforce and the network demands of large build pipelines
• Hands-on experience with network segmentation or zero-trust rollouts
• Comfortable using AI tooling to support infrastructure-as-code work