Network Engineering Manager in Belfast

Location: Remote UK, United Kingdom

Thales people architect identity management and data protection solutions at the heart of digital security. Business and governments rely on us to bring trust to the billions of digital interactions they have with people. Our technologies and services help banks exchange funds, people cross borders, energy become smarter and much more. More than 30,000 organizations already rely on us to verify the identities of people and things, grant access to digital services, analyze vast quantities of information and encrypt data to make the connected world more secure.

Together we offer fantastic opportunities for committed employees to learn and develop their career with us. At Thales UK, we research, develop, and supply technology and services that impact the lives of millions of people each day to make life better, and keep us safer. We innovate across the major industries of Aerospace, Defence, Security and Space. Your health and well-being matters to us and that’s why we offer you the flexibility to do what’s important to you; whether that’s part time hours, job sharing, home working, or the ability to flex your start and finish times. Where possible, we support a working pattern that suits your lifestyle and helps you reach your ambitions.

About the company: Imperva (A Thales Company) is an analyst-recognized cybersecurity leader—championing the fight to secure data and applications wherever they reside. Once deployed, our solutions proactively identify, evaluate, and eliminate current and emerging threats, so you never have to choose between innovating for your customers and protecting what matters most. Imperva was acquired by the Thales Group in 2023.

About the role: Imperva’s Infrastructure and Cloud Operations (ICO) team’s mission is to rebuild Imperva’s Points of Presence (PoPs) and core infrastructure with new modern technologies. We embrace Infrastructure as code at all levels, with automation as a core requirement for all projects. Staffed with senior leadership with experience in other major players, ICO is a powerful team that knows how to deliver significant change.

We are looking for a highly technical Network Engineering Manager to assume overall responsibility for designing, building and improving our global network. As an EM in the Engineering group your responsibility is to drive innovation, scale our platforms, and create operational excellence for Imperva’s globally distributed network. The person in this role has the freedom to make significant decisions that will have a lasting impact on Imperva’s infrastructure and how we serve our customers.

We will be looking to you to improve your team's approach to solving problems, while supporting and optimizing the infrastructure programmatically. You will work closely with leadership and your team to improve the overall availability, reliability, performance, and security of the infrastructure under your management. This is a very hands-on role— you will be expected to be in the weeds with your team, working collaboratively and cross-functionally on projects and systems. You will need to develop a deep technical understanding of our systems and help grow and mentor your team of Engineers and architects.

Objectives:

• Take a critical look at our network from an internet perspective and develop a strategy to improve traffic flows across the internet and within our pops.
• Along with our architects, design and build a clear road map to modernize and stabilize our network infrastructure.
• Develop and mentor Network Engineers to develop and grow into the roles they want to take on in the future, whether management or senior technical leadership.
• Work with the SRE / Observability teams to ensure we are measuring the right things and planning for improvements.
• Work with the Network Automation team to build better and faster automation for network changes and traffic management.
• As we develop our configurations and improve our network ensure the percentage of configurations managed by code is growing.
• Monitor and ensure that reliability & quality are constantly improving, using automation and best practices to reduce the time to production for new services.
• Engage constructively and proactively with our Product Engineering and Product Management teams, ensuring that we have buy-in and alignment in our new infrastructure designs.
• Partner with our Global Service Delivery Team (Network operations Engineers & Network Operations Center) to ensure we are all working to the same goals.

Responsibilities:

• Work collaboratively with leadership and your team to plan monthly and quarterly workload to ensure that everyone is aligned on their projects and priorities.
• Work with the Imperva PMO to plan and execute programs of work.
• Ensure that we are following and developing best practices. Ensure the team are delivering high quality engineering.
• Work cross-functionally to troubleshoot and resolve business and project affecting issues.
• Respond to escalations, help with incident response, RCAs, and provide management of and follow-up from postmortems.
• Establish and report on metrics for data-driven decisions to help increase availability, reliability, and velocity.

Qualifications:

• At least 7 years of professional experience, with at least 3 years in a leadership role in a significant web infrastructure.
• Significant experience running global networks with BGP and anycast routing.
• Expert level knowledge of network protocols.
• Experience analyzing, building and using network telemetry.
• Experience with software engineering best practices/standards is necessary.
• Working knowledge and experience of Agile software development methodologies.
• Outstanding collaboration and communication ability, and documentation skills with a proven ability to work cross-functionally.
• BS/MS in computer science, engineering, or a related technical discipline or equivalent experience.
• Experience with DevOps principles and concepts such as Infrastructure as Code (Ansible/Saltstack), CI/CD (Gitlab, Jenkins, Git), monitoring and visualization (Prometheus, Grafana) are a significant bonus.
• Experience with Python and Go would be a plus.
• Experience managing a team of globally diverse Engineers, with a broad spectrum of experience.

In line with Thales' Baseline Security requirements, candidates will be asked to provide evidence of identity, eligibility to work in the UK and employment and/or education history for up to three years. Some vacancies may require full Security Clearance which can require further evidence to be provided.

At Thales we provide CAREERS and not only jobs. With Thales employing 80,000 employees in 68 countries our mobility policy enables thousands of employees each year to develop their careers at home and abroad, in their existing areas of expertise or by branching out into new fields. Together we believe that embracing flexibility is a smarter way of working. Thales UK is committed to providing an inclusive and barrier-free recruitment process.