Network Specialist

Investec is a distinctive Specialist Bank serving clients principally in the UK and South Africa. Our culture gives us our edge: we work hard to find colleagues who'll think out of the ordinary and we put them in environments where they'll flourish. We combine a flat structure with a focus on internal mobility. If you can bring an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to learn and collaborate to your work, this could be the boost your career deserves.

Embedded in our culture is a sense of belonging and inclusion. This creates an environment in which everyone is free to be themselves which helps to drive innovation, creativity and ultimately business performance. At Investec we want everyone to find it easy to be themselves, and to feel they belong. It's a responsibility we all share and is integral to our purpose and values as an organisation.

Reporting to the ITS Routing & Switching Service team lead, the Network Specialist is seen as a technical expert in core networking infrastructure and technology.

This is a highly technical and hands-on role, with a focus on design, deployment, management and daily operation of the core networking and connectivity infrastructure. The role further requires troubleshooting complex operational issues as well as delivering first class support to internal business units.

You should possess in-depth knowledge of core networking concepts and technologies, working in a high impact, mission critical environment where service matters and exceeding expectations is the norm.

Key responsibilities

The Network Specialist's primary areas of responsibility include designing, deploying, maintaining core network and connectivity infrastructure. Ensuring defined standards in place, manage the technical lifecycle of products and services. Deliver designs to support change/transformation against standards. Ensuring a smooth transition/handover to operations post go live with all supporting documentation.

Services you will be responsible for include, but are not limited to: Campus, Branch, and Data Centre IP/Layer 2/Layer 3 networking, LAN, WAN, Wireless and Cloud connectivity.
- Responsibilities include:
- Defining, documenting Network & Communications Standards.
- Handle proof of concept testing and network design validation testing.
- Assist in the creation of service and technology roadmaps.
- Vendor engagement and management to support outsourced services.
- Vendor engagement to improve current services and technologies as defined in our roadmap.
- Identify and resolve all hardware related problems for better performance and detect issues for networking strategies.
- Responsible for creating high level design documents that meet all stakeholder requirements.
- Responsible for the creation of Low-Level detailed design documents.
- Responsible for the creation of detailed Implementation plans and operational guides.
- Responsible for ensuring the smooth transition/handover to operations of solutions in line with agreed Operational Acceptance Process
- Responsible for ensuring personal skillsets are relevant and up to date.
- Responsible for providing escalation support as required.
- Provide on call support (rota basis) and work extended hours as and when required.

Core Skills & Experience
- You will have excellent hands-on experience of core networking within a global enterprise scale organization (5000-10,000+ users), designing and delivering solutions.
- You will have considerable first-hand experience of design, engineering and building sustainable and scalable solutions, ideally within finance or investment banking.
- You will be expert at leading and resolving complex incidents and problems.
- You will have an attention to detail in everything you do along with a natural willingness to help your customers and colleagues.

Technical Skills & Experience
- You will have expert knowledge and experience of the following areas:

- Cisco Routing & Switching (IOS, ASR, ISR and Nexus)
- Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
- Wireless Controllers & Access Points
- Packet Capture and NetFlow analysis
- BGP and OSPF routing
- Policy and route-map configuration
- MPLS, DMVPN, IPSec VPN, TACACS authentication
- VLAN, Spanning Tree, L3 interfaces, HSRP, TCP/IP
- QoS (Quality of Service), ACL (Access Control Lists)
- Network Monitoring, Management & Alerting as per standard
- CMDB management as per standard.
- Cloud networking concepts and configurations

It is desirable and advantageous to also have knowledge and experience of the following areas:

- WAN-Optimization and acceleration technologies
- Software Defined Networking concepts and technologies
- Network Automation concepts and technologies (Ansible, Python, Terraform)
- Internet exchange and content delivery architecture
- Azure fundamentals
- ForeScout Network Access Control (NAC)
- Firewall concepts and technologies

Technical Certification
- You will require the following certification or demonstrable working experience