Senior Network Engineer

Job Title: Network Engineer

Location: London

Job Type: Full time

Role purpose

The Network Engineer will be responsible for the development, governance, and ongoing improvement of Verne’s network strategy across all regions, covering both corporate IT environments and OT environments supporting data centre operations. The role is based in the UK headquarters but has a group-wide remit, with responsibility for ensuring that network architecture, standards, controls, documentation, and operational practices are robust, secure, auditable, and aligned with business growth.

This is a key role requiring close collaboration with Compliance, Operations, and IT Security Operations to ensure that Verne’s network estate is designed and maintained to a high standard, capable of meeting internal governance requirements, supporting ISO-aligned controls, and standing up to customer audit scrutiny.

This is a senior individual contributor role with significant influence over network architecture, standards, and operational practices across the organisation. It is a rare opportunity to help shape and influence network strategy across a growing multi-site, multi-region platform, with exposure to both enterprise IT and OT environments supporting critical data centre operations.

Key responsibilities

• Define, maintain, and continuously improve the company’s network strategy across all regions, covering office IT networks, campus connectivity, and OT network environments supporting data centre operations.
• Develop and maintain network standards, reference architectures, and approved design principles for both IT and OT environments, including resilience, segmentation, remote access, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Own and maintain network documentation to a high standard, ensuring diagrams, standards, support procedures, asset records, logical and physical topologies, configuration baselines, and control narratives remain current and aligned with IMS requirements.
• Work with Compliance to ensure network controls, records, and operating practices support internal governance requirements, ISO-aligned management systems, and customer audit expectations.
• Work with the Head of IT and wider IT team to ensure network architecture and operational controls support secure access, segmentation, monitoring, hardening, logging, and incident response across the enterprise and data centre estate.
• Work with Operations and site teams to ensure network solutions are practical, supportable, and appropriate for critical operational environments.
• Support the separation, integration, and secure management of IT and OT environments, ensuring appropriate boundaries, access control, segmentation, and change discipline.
• Lead network design reviews for new sites, expansions, upgrades, and remediation projects, ensuring solutions are scalable, supportable, and aligned with company standards.
• Oversee network change control practices and ensure that network changes are planned, reviewed, documented, approved, and implemented in a controlled manner.
• Provide technical leadership on routing, switching, wireless, WAN, firewall integration, remote connectivity, and network availability across the business.
• Support network-related audit responses, customer due diligence requests, risk assessments, remediation actions, and control improvement plans.
• Establish and maintain network performance, availability, and compliance reporting, including the use of KPIs and trend analysis to drive service improvement.
• Work with internal teams and third-party service providers to ensure that network services are delivered, maintained, and documented in accordance with company requirements.
• Contribute to incident investigation, root cause analysis, and corrective action planning for network-related service issues.
• Ensure that network platforms remain maintainable and supportable through disciplined lifecycle, patching, backup, and configuration management practices.
• Provide technical guidance and escalation support to IT support teams and local site resources across the regions.
• The role will involve occasional travel to Verne sites and offices in support of projects, audits, and operational needs.
• Some out-of-hours support will be needed for planned changes, incident response, or critical operational activities.

Candidate profile

The successful candidate will be technically strong, well organised, and capable of operating across both strategic and hands-on activities. They must be comfortable working in a collaborative environment with IT, Security, Compliance, and Operations stakeholders, while maintaining a high level of discipline around documentation, control, and follow-through.

This role requires an individual who is trusted to work in and around critical environments, who understands the importance of change control and auditability, and who can combine sound engineering judgement with strong governance discipline. The individual must be motivated, accustomed to working in a team environment, and capable of helping set a high standard for network management across a growing multi-region platform.

Skills and experience

Essential

• Proven experience administering enterprise firewall platforms (preferably Fortinet FortiGate), including firewall policy management, VPN configuration, network segmentation, threat prevention, and secure remote access.

• Significant experience in network engineering, network infrastructure, or network operations roles.

• Strong knowledge of enterprise networking fundamentals, including routing, switching, TCP/IP, WAN, wireless, VPN, and network resilience.
• Experience developing or maintaining network standards, architecture principles, and technical documentation.
• Experience supporting or governing network environments across multiple sites or regions.
• Strong documentation capability, including network diagrams, standards, procedures, support models, and operational records.
• Experience working within structured ticketing, change control, and incident management processes.
• Experience with Fortinet security technologies, including FortiGate firewalls, and the ability to configure, troubleshoot, and maintain enterprise security appliances in production environments.
• Ability to work effectively with Compliance, Security, and Operations teams to ensure network controls are well designed and well evidenced.
• Strong understanding of network security architecture, including firewall design and administration, segmentation, access control, secure remote access, intrusion prevention, monitoring, logging, and security hardening..
• Experience supporting audit or compliance requirements in regulated or customer-sensitive environments.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to engage both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to manage competing priorities in a structured and dependable way.
• Awareness of the importance of operational discipline and procedural control in critical environments.

Desirable

• Experience with OT, ICS, or other operationally critical network environments.
• Experience with the wider Fortinet Security Fabric ecosystem, including FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiAuthenticator, FortiNAC, or FortiEMS.Familiarity with network segmentation approaches between IT and OT environments.
• Experience supporting ISO/IEC 27001-aligned environments or similar management system and audit frameworks.
• Experience with configuration standards, backup management, and network lifecycle planning.
• Experience with hybrid and cloud networking environments, including AWS and/or Azure connectivity, routing, segmentation, and security considerations.
• Experience producing KPI reporting, dashboards, or service trend analysis.
• Experience using tools such as Power BI for service, operational, or compliance reporting.
• Basic scripting or automation capability to support reporting, configuration consistency, or operational efficiency.
• Experience managing or coordinating third-party network service providers.
• Relevant enterprise-class vendor exposure such as Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper.

Qualifications

• Relevant experience in network engineering is more important than a specific degree requirement.
• A degree or technical qualification in networking, computer systems, information technology, or a related discipline would be beneficial.
• Relevant certifications such as CCNA, CCNP, Network+, or equivalent would be advantageous.

What We Offer:

• Opportunity to be part of a fast-growing, private equity-backed company.
• A dynamic, innovative, and inclusive working environment.
• Competitive compensation and benefits package.
• The chance to work with a talented and ambitious international team.