Network & Security Expert

Senior Network & Security Operations Engineer

1. Context

As part of the development of an internal platform designed to accelerate the development, deployment, and operation of software products addressing major challenges in the energy sector, we are seeking a Senior Network & Security Operations Engineer.

The platform is a cloud-native, service-oriented solution that provides application teams with self-service capabilities to develop, run, and operate their applications. It delivers infrastructure, data management, application lifecycle management, CI/CD services, and operational capabilities. The platform is deployed in a hybrid cloud environment, combining private cloud infrastructure with selected public cloud services.

The Local Operations team in Germany is responsible for running the production platform hosting critical business applications. In this context, the consultant will play a key role in ensuring the availability, security, compliance, and continuous improvement of Network & Security services.

2. Mission

Production Operations & Support

• Act as the Tier-3 operational owner for Network & Security services within the production platform.
• Monitor system health, performance, and service availability across multi-tenant environments.
• Diagnose and resolve complex incidents related to connectivity, routing, firewalling, and service exposure.
• Lead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) activities and coordinate corrective and preventive actions.

Deployment Readiness & Operational Excellence

• Validate deployment artifacts from an operational perspective.
• Ensure rollback strategies, monitoring capabilities, and observability mechanisms are in place before production releases.
• Define and enforce quality assurance requirements for production readiness, including documentation, operational procedures, and successful testing evidence.
• Ensure operational readiness for Network & Security-related changes.

Continuous Improvement & Automation

• Identify recurring operational tasks and automate them to reduce operational toil.
• Contribute to improving service reliability and reducing Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
• Validate automation initiatives according to established software development lifecycle standards, including testing and review processes.

Operational Governance & Compliance

• Apply and promote ITSM best practices, including Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management.
• Implement operational controls supporting security and compliance requirements.
• Define and maintain monitoring, logging, and audit evidence collection strategies.
• Coordinate vulnerability management activities and remediation efforts.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Collaborate closely with Kubernetes, Data, Storage, and Platform Engineering teams to resolve cross-domain production issues.
• Support platform and application teams in addressing network and security constraints impacting clusters and applications.

3. Profile Required

Mandatory Experience & Skills

• Minimum 5 years of experience operating enterprise networks in production environments (private cloud and/or data center).
• Proven experience managing Incident, Problem, Change, and Release processes in production environments.
• Strong troubleshooting and incident response capabilities across networking and security domains.
• Solid expertise in WAN/LAN environments and enterprise networking technologies from Cisco, Juniper, and Palo Alto.
• Hands-on experience with ACI, Apstra, and Panorama solutions.
• Strong understanding of tenant private networking and connectivity patterns supporting production platforms.
• Good knowledge of ITSM principles and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) concepts.
• Experience managing DNS services and certificate lifecycle processes using Infoblox.
• Proficiency with Jira Service Management (JSM), Jira, and Confluence.
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Mimir, Loki, or equivalent tools.
• Proven ability to create, document, and enforce operational procedures, runbooks, and playbooks.
• Understanding of modern platform operations, including Kubernetes, containerized environments, automation, and observability.
• Familiarity with GitOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts, including Terraform/OpenTofu, ArgoCD, and Helm.

Language Requirements

• Professional proficiency in English, both written and spoken (minimum C1 level).
• Professional proficiency in German, both written and spoken (minimum C1 level).

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience working in highly regulated or high-availability industries such as energy, telecommunications, banking, healthcare, or the public sector.
• Knowledge of SRE practices, including SLI/SLO management and error budgets.
• Familiarity with modern DevOps toolchains such as GitLab, JFrog Artifactory, Backstage, and Harness.
• Exposure to Infrastructure as Code and GitOps-driven deployment models for network and security configurations.