Network Lead

Autonomai Recruitment; Sydney; On-site; AUD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Autonomai Recruitment is seeking a senior Network Engineering leader to own, evolve and scale the network infrastructure that underpins its trading business. This is a highly technical leadership role at the intersection of networking, infrastructure, trading and business strategy.

The successful candidate will shape performance, resilience and long-term direction of a latency-sensitive global network, while building a high-performing team of specialist network engineers.

Qualifications

• Technical leadership in networking and production systems.
• Experience with architecture decisions and complex operational problems.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of highly specialised network engineers with autonomy and ownership.
• Own the technical strategy and evolution of global network infrastructure across data-centre, WAN and colocation environments.
• Define architecture standards and design principles to improve scalability, resilience, performance, maintainability and simplicity.
• Drive convergence of architectures, tooling and practices across regions while allowing divergence for latency or business needs.
• Partner with trading and technology teams to translate priorities into network strategy and roadmap.
• Make informed trade-offs across latency, resilience, complexity, risk and engineering effort.
• Lead major network initiatives from problem definition through architecture, implementation and outcomes.
• Own capacity planning, connectivity strategy and evolution of network performance across global environment.
• Define and execute network infrastructure-as-code, automated provisioning and CI/CD deployment.
• Drive automation and AI-assisted tooling to reduce toil and accelerate incident response.
• Ensure the network is observable and resilient; lead during incidents and market events.
• Challenge existing architectures and identify simplifications to reduce risk.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure and software teams to improve tooling and standards.
• Build relationships with exchanges, carriers, colocation providers, vendors and partners.
• Contribute to Infrastructure leadership and engineering culture.

Job description

A leading global trading firm is seeking a senior Network Engineering leader to own, evolve and scale the network infrastructure that underpins its trading business. This is a highly technical leadership role at the intersection of networking, infrastructure, trading and business strategy.

The successful candidate will shape the performance, resilience and long-term direction of a latency-sensitive global network, while building and developing a high-performing team of specialist network engineers.

The role requires someone equally comfortable going deep on architecture, setting direction for senior engineers, making risk-based trade-offs and partnering with trading and technology leadership.

The opportunity

The network is a critical component of the firm’s trading platform. This role will directly influence the speed, resilience and scalability of the infrastructure that enables its trading strategies and competitive edge.

The successful candidate will act as a key bridge between trading, technology and network engineering translating commercial priorities into infrastructure strategy, investment decisions and delivery priorities. They will also play an active role in the wider Infrastructure leadership group, helping shape engineering standards, operating practices and technical culture across a global organisation.

This is not a generalist management position. Technical credibility is essential: the successful candidate will remain close to complex production systems, architecture decisions and difficult operational problems, while creating the conditions for others to deliver at a high standard.

What the role involves

• Lead, develop and grow a team of highly specialised network engineers, setting a high technical bar while creating an environment of autonomy, ownership and continuous development.
• Own the technical strategy and evolution of global network infrastructure across data-centre, WAN and colocation environments.
• Define architecture standards and design principles that improve scalability, resilience, performance, maintainability and operational simplicity.
• Drive convergence of architectures, tooling and operating practices across regions where it improves performance, resilience and simplicity—while allowing purposeful divergence where latency, market structure or business requirements demand it.
• Partner with trading and technology teams to understand business priorities and translate them into network strategy, investment decisions and roadmap priorities.
• Make informed trade-offs across latency, resilience, complexity, operational risk, engineering effort and business opportunity.
• Lead major network initiatives from problem definition through architecture, implementation and measurable business outcomes.
• Own capacity planning, connectivity strategy and the continued evolution of network performance and resilience across a globally distributed environment.
• Define and execute the approach to network infrastructure-as-code, automated provisioning and CI/CD-driven deployment.
• Drive automation, including the appropriate use of AI-assisted tooling, to reduce operational toil, improve engineering effectiveness and accelerate incident detection and response.
• Ensure the network is observable, resilient and operationally well understood; provide technical leadership during complex incidents and high-impact market events.
• Challenge existing architectures and assumptions, identifying opportunities to simplify the environment, improve performance and reduce risk.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure and software engineering teams to improve common tooling, observability, deployment practices and operational standards.
• Build strong relationships with exchanges, carriers, colocation providers, vendors and other external partners.
• Contribute to Infrastructure leadership, helping shape department-wide strategy, technical standards and engineering culture.

What the firm offers

The successful candidate will join a high calibre, technically demanding environment where infrastructure decisions have a direct and measurable impact on trading performance. They will work alongside exceptional engineers, traders and technology leaders across global offices, with genuine ownership of critical systems and the opportunity to shape the future of the firm’s network platform.

The role offers the opportunity to:

• Lead and develop a world class network engineering team.
• Influence the architecture and strategy of a global, latency sensitive trading network.
• Work on some of the most demanding infrastructure challenges in financial markets.
• Partner directly with trading and senior technology leadership.
• Drive meaningful improvements in performance, resilience, automation and engineering culture.