Network Team Lead
Location: Bolton/Manchester 2-3 Days Per Week
Contract Length : Three Months
Rate: 450 - 500 per day Inside IR35
I am working with a fast-growing IT consultancy who are quickly developing a strong reputation by helping organisations accelerate their digital transformations through expert delivery across cloud, AI, software engineering and enterprise technology.
They combine strategic consultancy with hands on technical expertise and partner with clients to solve complex challenges and deliver scalable solutions. They are now looking for a Network Team Lead to join them on a Three-month contract.
Role Overview
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
Technical Leadership (Hands-on)
- 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.
Team Leadership
- 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.
Operational Delivery
- 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.
Project Delivery
- 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.
Security & Networking Controls
- 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.
Supplier & Partner Management
- 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.
Technical Scope
- 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
Additional Requirements
- 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.
Skills & Experience
Essential
- 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
Desirable
- 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
Key Outcomes / Success Measures
- 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.