Network Engineer

The National Lottery Community Fund is looking for a skilled and proactive Network Engineer to become part of their compact IT Infrastructure Team located in Birmingham. This role will report directly to the Head of IT Infrastructure. Hybrid office working is available, though occasional travel to various UK sites will be required. As a Network Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in maintaining and enhancing our IT network, ensuring optimal performance, up-to-date security, and reliability. Responsibilities:

• Be an integral part of the Team and act as the go to person and SME for networking requirements.
• Collaborate closely with Network Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers, Security Team and Project Managers to understand and address their requirements.
• Manage and optimise network infrastructure, including on-premise networks, public cloud (Azure) networks, virtual networks and WAN technologies.
• Configure and manage Firewalls, Routers, Access Points, Switches, SD-WAN and Networking Appliances.
• Demonstrate advanced knowledge of networking, including TCP/IP protocols, subnetting, VLANs, load balancing, and VPNs.
• Apply strong analytical and troubleshooting skills to resolve network issues.
• Strong interpersonal and problem-solving skills.
• Monitor network performance, identify and resolve bottlenecks.
• Collaborate with service desk staff, providing education and support while resolving network-related tickets.
• Be responsible for end-to-end delivery of the Project tasks.
• Lead networking element of projects to improve production environments.
• Configuring and installing hardware in both office and data centre environments.
• Ability to write clear, concise technical documentation such as Network Designs.
• Responsible for ensuring that any designs produced are in line with the current network architecture and infrastructure strategy documentation and are fit for purpose.
• Contribute to design and architecture discussions.
• Mitigate Pen Test and Audit findings.
• Participate in out of hours implementations of change/support as required.
• Accurate estimation of workload and timelines for delivery.
• Support and maintain backup and disaster recovery solutions.
• Compliance to regulatory and mandatory policies.
• Relevant vendor management experience.
• Provide timely updates and whenever necessary timely escalation of issues to right stakeholders.
  
  3+ years in network administration and deployment.
• Experience with Cisco Switches, including configuration, security, and firmware updates.
• Knowledge of Firewalls (Preferentially Barracuda and Azure Firewalls).
• Experience with Microsoft Azure cloud services and architectures, networking (NSG, VNet peering, UDR, Private Link/Endpoint, Azure Firewall, load balancer).
• Knowledge of Aruba SilverPeak SD-WAN.
• Analyze, troubleshoot, and resolve incidents escalated from service desk support., Knowledge of Arista Wireless Access Points.
• Zero Trust Network Architecture - Security Service Edge such as Netskope or Zscaler.
• Familiarity with PRTG, SolarWinds or similar monitoring tooling.
  
  Communities in the UK come in all shapes and sizes. National Lottery funding is for everyone - therefore, we are committed to equity, diversity and inclusion and we work hard to ensure our funding reaches where it is needed.
We also believe our people should represent the communities, organisations and individuals we work with. That's why The National Lottery Community Fund is committed to being an inclusive employer and a great place to work. We recognise and celebrate the fact that our people come from diverse backgrounds. We positively welcome applications from people from ethnic minority backgrounds, people with disabilities or longstanding health conditions, people who are LGBTQ+, and people from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds, as well as people of all ages. As a Disability Confident Employer, we take a proactive approach in making reasonable adjustments, if needed, throughout the recruitment process and during employment. (This can be related to a physical and mental health condition.)