Lead Network Operations Engineer

Job description

We tackle the most complex problems in quantitative finance, by bringing scientific clarity to financial complexity. From our London HQ, we unite world-class researchers and engineers in an environment that values deep exploration and methodical execution - because the best ideas take time to evolve. Together we’re building a world-class platform to amplify our teams’ most powerful ideas. As part of our engineering team, you’ll shape the platforms and tools that drive high-impact research - designing systems that scale, accelerate discovery and support innovation across the firm. Take the next step in your career. The role This is an exciting opportunity to shape and mature operational processes through automation and observability. You will own the reliability, performance, and security of the organisation’s network and security infrastructure across datacentre and office environments. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on operational excellence, automation, observability, and incident response — ensuring high availability, resilience, and a strong security posture. Key responsibilities: Own the day-to-day performance, stability, availability, and security of network platforms across datacentre, WAN, and campus environments Lead response to critical incidents, driving rapid diagnosis, containment, and long-term remediation Champion an automation-first approach, reducing operational toil through tooling, observability, and emerging technologies (including agentic AI) Develop and refine operational tooling, runbooks, and incident response frameworks to ensure consistent, high-quality service delivery Support an event-driven network architecture aligned with Infrastructure as Code principles Enhance observability across telemetry, alerting, and performance monitoring to enable proactive operations Partner with Network and Security Engineering to ensure new designs meet operational, performance, and security standards Drive continuous improvement initiatives focused on efficiency, reliability, and scalability Identify systemic issues through incident analysis and implement structural, long-term fixes Support capacity planning, performance optimisation, and operational readiness for changes and upgrades Who are we looking for? The ideal candidate will have the following experience: Strong hands-on experience in networking operations within enterprise or large-scale environments (datacentre, WAN, campus) Proven experience operating network security infrastructure (firewalls, load balancers, proxies, TACACS) Solid understanding of switching and routing (Cisco/Arista, L2/L3) and routing protocols (BGP, EVPN-VXLAN) Good knowledge of modern network security principles (e.g. zero trust, micro-segmentation) Experience managing physical network circuits and vendor relationships Familiarity with automation and CI/CD tooling (e.g. Ansible, Python, Jenkins) and Infrastructure as Code Experience with observability and monitoring tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK) Strong ability to analyse and troubleshoot distributed systems end-to-end Proactive, self-starting mindset with a strong sense of ownership Comfortable engaging with stakeholders across infrastructure and application teams Why should you apply? Highly competitive compensation plus annual discretionary bonus Lunch provided (via Just Eat for Business ) and dedicated barista bar 30 days' annual leave 9% company pension contributions Informal dress code and excellent work/life balance Comprehensive healthcare and life assurance Cycle-to-work scheme Monthly company events G-Research is committed to cultivating and preserving an inclusive work environment. We are an ideas-driven business and we place great value on diversity of experience and opinions. We want to ensure that applicants receive a recruitment experience that enables them to perform at their best. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation please let us know in the relevant section