Network Infrastructure Specialist in Southampton

Our client is a leading figurehead in the UK food sector, with an unparalleled pedigree dating back to the early 18th century. They are currently seeking a Technical Specialist to join their busy Technical Services Team.

Reporting to the Technical Support Manager, the Network Technical Specialist shall be responsible for leading (hands on) the remediation and standardisation of Operational Technology (OT) firewall environments across all factory sites and establishing the governance and best practices required for their ongoing management.

• Review all factory-based firewall configurations and identify risks and audit gaps
• Remove or remediate unused policies and permissive rules
• Ensure firewall rules align with least privilege principles
• Implement and enforce standard firewall rule sets across all sites
• Correct rule ordering and eliminate inconsistent or overly open configurations
• Ensure key standard policies are consistently deployed
• Define and maintain reusable policy blocks for future deployments
• Support the migration of OT networks to a standardised architecture
• Establish firewalls as the “front and centre” control point for all OT networks
• Transition away from legacy routing via the corporate core
• Establish and govern lifecycle processes for firewall rules
• Implement ongoing controls
• Ensure temporary rules are tracked, reviewed, and removed when no longer required
• Work with Architecture team and specialist third parties to implement network segmentation controls within AWS environment
• Deploy and configure detection and monitoring rules to improve visibility of network traffic and access patterns
• Support the review and tuning of controls to identify overly permissive access and security gaps
• Progressively tighten and enforce network access controls in line with agreed security standards
• Ensure Datacentre environments align with OT and corporate firewall and segmentation policies

• Strong experience with Fortinet / Fortigate firewalls (essential)
• Firewall policy design, auditing and optimisation
• Network segmentation, VLANs and VRF concepts
• Experience working with OT or hybrid IT/OT environments
• Experienced with firewall management tools (e.g. FortiManager)
• Proven experience delivering audit remediation or security improvement programmes
• Ability to work across multiple sites and complex environments