Network Operations Manager

Playtech is searching for a Network Operations Manager, a senior leader who blends strategic vision, technical depth, operational excellence, and automation-first thinking. You will oversee global network operations, steer architecture strategy, and lead high-performance teams ensuring our networks are secure, reliable, highly available, and future-ready. This is a role for someone who wants to shape the network foundation of a business running 24/7/365 across the globe, thousands of virtual machines, and PB of storage.

• Lead with vision, clarity, and operational ownership.
• Manage, coach, and develop two network teams: Network Operations & Network Automation.
• Set strategic direction and long-term roadmap for network operations aligned with products priorities and business needs.
• Foster a high-trust, high-performance culture rooted in operational excellence, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Drive resilient, secure, and high-availability network operations.
• Oversee daily operations for globally distributed network environments supporting mission-critical services.
• Own queue health, prioritization, escalation pathways, and the full lifecycle of network incidents.
• Lead major incident response, triage, decision-making, and cross-team coordination aligned with Playtech’s Critical Incident Management framework.
• Ensure infrastructure is audit-ready, secure, patched, monitored, and consistently documented.
• Architect, innovate, and modernize the network landscape.
• Direct the design and implementation of robust, secure, fault-tolerant global network solutions.
• Oversee and enforce network security standards (firewalls, segmentation, access, encryption).
• Implement and optimize monitoring & alerting frameworks to increase visibility and reduce MTTR.
• Scale through automation, IaC, and NetDevOps practices.
• Drive modern Network Automation, Infrastructure-as-Code, and API-driven operations.
• Build consistent change management processes leveraging automation to reduce toil and operational risk.
• Partner with Platform, Security, and Infra Engineering teams to design standardized deployments, templates, and CI/CD-style network change pipelines.
• Influence and collaborate across the business.
• Work closely with senior leaders.
• Manage vendor partnerships, operational budgets, and technology procurement roadmaps.
• Communicate complex network topics clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Bring deep expertise in core networking: TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, routing/switching (BGP, STP), VLANs, VPNs (IPsec/SSL). (required)
• Have strong hands-on experience with: Checkpoint Firewalls, F5 Load Balancers, Cisco routers & switches, DDoS protection technologies. (required)
• Demonstrate strong proficiency in advanced troubleshooting, performance optimization, and fault-tolerant design patterns. (required)
• Understand AWS cloud networking, VPCs, hybrid connectivity, and Kubernetes networking (e.g., Calico). (required)
• Master Network Automation (Python, Ansible), APIs, IaC methodologies, and NetDevOps workflows. (required)
• Bring strong understanding of monitoring, alerting, availability, and observability tooling. (required)
• Have demonstrated success leading multidisciplinary technical teams in large-scale environments. (required)
• Drive strategic planning, tech evaluation, and roadmap execution. (required)
• Manage multiple concurrent projects with clarity, structure, and communication. (required)
• Experience designing network automation pipelines end-to-end. (nice-to-have)
• Strong scripting capabilities enabling deep automation and tooling development. (nice-to-have)
• ITIL/ITSM exposure for enterprise operations maturity. (nice-to-have)
• Past experience with migration projects, modernization programs, or hybrid cloud architectures. (nice-to-have)