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