Network Capability Manager

Are you a senior network leader looking for your next career move? Do you want to lead a critical capability delivering secure network services across government and defence clients?

As our Network Capability Lead, you’ll take ownership of a broad and strategically important domain covering routing, switching, firewalling, network design and performance, along with the specialist platforms and monitoring tools that underpin secure operations. You’ll be the single accountable leader for the domain – setting technical direction, defining engineering standards, and leading the people who deliver against them.

We can offer great career progression opportunities, ability to be based anywhere across the UK, benefits which you can flex to meet your needs, and training and development opportunities. This role is primarily remote, with travel required as needed for customer engagement, collaboration, and key meetings.

What you'll be doing:

• Providing senior technical leadership and strategic direction for the network domain, working through Principal Architects and Engineers to define standards and patterns.
• Owning and maintaining technical standards, reference architectures, and approved patterns across multiple teams and client environments.
• Leading and developing engineers within the capability, with full accountability for performance, progression, and overall people outcomes.
• Representing the domain in Design Authority forums and contributing to cross-capability technical alignment.
• Acting as the final point of technical escalation, making sound decisions where risk or differing expert views exist.
• Leading recruitment for technical roles within the domain, defining requirements and assessing candidates for suitability.

What you’ll bring:

• Strong senior technical leadership experience within infrastructure, with credibility recognised by engineering peers.
• Proven ability to lead, develop and grow technical teams in complex delivery environments.
• Experience setting and maintaining technical standards across multiple teams or accounts.
• Strong network engineering background across routing, switching, firewalling and secure network environments.
• Ability to make sound technical judgements in real delivery contexts, not just theoretical design.
• Experience working in enterprise or multi-supplier environments, including secure or classified networks.

It would be great if you had:

• Experience working within a supplier or systems integrator delivering to UK public sector clients.
• Experience in capability or practice leadership models beyond project or programme delivery.
• A track record of mentoring and developing senior engineers or architects.
• Experience working with workforce planning or HR functions on recruitment and performance.
• Experience supporting government, defence, or critical national infrastructure clients.
• Familiarity with vendor platforms such as Cisco, Palo Alto, F5 or equivalent technologies.

If you’re interested in this role but not sure if your skills and experience are exactly what we’re looking for, please do apply, we’d love to hear from you!

Employment Type: Full-time, Permanent.
Location: UK-based – remote with travel as required.
Security Clearance Level: Security cleared – minimum eligibility for SC clearance, with route to DV where required.
Internal Recruiter: Rebecca.
Salary: £85,000 – £100,000.
Benefits: MIP bonus, £6,600 car allowance, 25 days annual leave with the option to buy additional days, private medical, life assurance, pension, and generous flexible benefits fund.

Although this role is advertised as full-time, we believe that flexibility at work can promote work/life balance, increase your motivation, reduce stress and improves performance and productivity. We support different ways of working and can offer a range of flexible working arrangements. So, if you’re interested and need to work flexibly, we encourage you to apply and talk to us about what might be possible.

Loved reading about this job and want to know more about us?

Sopra Steria’s Aerospace, Defence and Security business designs, develops and deploys digital solutions to Central Government clients. The work we do makes a real difference to the client’s goal of National Security, and we operate in a unique and privileged environment. We are given time for professional development activities, and we coach and mentor our colleagues, sharing knowledge and learning from each other. We foster a culture in which employees feel valued and supported and have pride in their work for the customer, delivering outstanding rates of customer satisfaction in the UK’s most complex safety- and security-critical markets.