Network Engineer

Opticore IT is a specialist Network Engineer and Project Management consultancy offering a wide variety of opportunities to work within fast-paced, challenging environments across our client base spanning multiple sectors including Finance, Broadcast Media, Telecommunications and more.

Opticore IT are currently searching for a Network Engineer who is operating at CCNA level with strong general routing and switching knowledge. You'll join ourexcelling team, in a position based in Manchester, with travel to other Northern sites, this opportunity will be predominantly on site.

You will act as the trusted on-site point of contact for users, local teams and the central networks function, handling the full incident spectrum from single-user issues to major outages, resolving service requests within change governance, and delivering small in-region projects.

What you'll be doing:

• Provide network incident support across the full severity spectrum, from single-user connectivity issues to major and global outages, diagnosing, troubleshooting and resolving connectivity problems.
• Coordinate incident response across teams when multiple users or critical services are affected, keeping stakeholders informed and driving issues through to resolution.
• Resolve service requests to give users the appropriate level of network access for their role, balancing responsiveness with governance.
• Follow company change procedures rigorously when making access or configuration changes, ensuring every change is properly reviewed, approved and documented.
• Deliver small in-region projects such as stack expansions and capacity upgrades.
• Perform physical infrastructure work including cabling, tracing and moving equipment.
• Serve as the on-the-ground interface between northern site teams and the central networks function, offering face-to-face support and building strong working relationships.
• Cover both Leeds and Manchester primary sites (minimum one day per week per site) plus additional regional locations including Preston and other locations.
• Apply automation within day-to-day work by consuming existing tooling, rather than authoring automation code or pipelines.
• Engage with the Juniper Mist, Palo Alto and Zscaler estate where relevant to in-region work.

What you'll bring:

• Cisco Routing & Switching + Core Networking Fundamentals - Solid grip on TCP/IP, routing, switching, VLANs, DNS, DHCP and VPN. Independent ownership of complex trouble tickets requiring testing, plus end-to-end delivery of in-region projects such as stack expansions and capacity upgrades.
• Incident Response & Change Management Discipline - Handles incidents across the full severity spectrum, from single-user issues to major outages. Keeps stakeholders informed, drives to resolution, and follows change procedures for every access or configuration change.
• Full UK Driving Licence & Own Car - due to travel required for this role.
• Hands-On Site Engineering & Multi-Site Coverage - Physical rack work (cabling, tracing, moving kit) combined with comfort operating across a distributed estate
• Network Automation (Consumer Level) - Happy to consume existing automation and tooling in day-to-day work, does not involve authoring automation code or building CI/CD pipelines.

What you’ll gain:

Here at OpticoreIT we believe in investing in our team as we understand that we are only as great as our engineers, so learning and development is a big deal for us. Whether you’re going for a CCNP, CCIE, Hashicorp, Python, Cloud Technology or anything in between OpticoreIT has your back with all our training, labs, courses, and shared knowledge and the most important part it’s all free! On top of that, we also give you:

• Competitive Salary & discretionary bonus
• 23 days holiday + bank holidays
• Private healthcare & dental
• Pension
• EV car, workplace nursery, tech, and cycle-to-work salary sacrifice schemes
• Team & Company Social events
• EMI share scheme

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