Head of Network Engineering

Location: Midtown NYC Work Model: Hybrid — In office 3 days/week Compensation: Base up to $350,000; Total compensation up to $850,000 (could be more for right talent)

(base + discretionary bonus; may include long-term incentives)

Employment Type: Full-time Business: World Leading Hedge Fund

Overview

A World Leading Hedge Fund is seeking a Head of Network Engineering to own strategy, architecture, and operations for a global, low-latency network that underpins trading and enterprise workloads. You’ll lead a high-performing team, evolve a hybrid on-prem/cloud footprint, harden security, and drive automation/SRE practices to achieve world-class availability, performance, and observability.

What You’ll Do

· Set strategy & lead: Define and execute the multi-year network roadmap aligned to business goals; hire, coach, and develop a high-caliber engineering and operations team.

· Architect for performance: Design scalable, secure, and efficient L2/L3 architectures for low-latency/high-frequency trading—data center, campus, WAN/SD-WAN, colocation, and market/exchange connectivity.

· Operate & optimize: Own day-to-day operations, capacity planning, and reliability; establish SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, and post-mortems; reduce latency, jitter, and packet loss across critical paths.

· Secure the edge & core: Enforce least-privilege and Zero Trust principles; implement segmentation, DDoS/IPS/WAF controls, encryption in transit, and comprehensive audit logging.

· Cloud & hybrid networking: Design and operate AWS/GCP/Azure networking (VPC/VNet, TGW, Direct Connect/ExpressRoute, PrivateLink, NAT, GWLB) and hybrid connectivity.

· Automation & IaC: Drive Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible) and NetDevOps (Python/Go, CI/CD) for repeatable builds, config compliance, and change safety.

· Observability & SRE: Implement deep telemetry (streaming, gNMI), active/passive monitoring, and synthetic tests using Prometheus/Grafana/ELK/CloudWatch/ThousandEyes/Kentik; automate incident response.

· Resilience & continuity: Own DR/BCP for network services; conduct regular failover testing and tabletop exercises.

· Vendor & budget management: Lead vendor selection, contracts, and lifecycle; manage budgets and total cost with data-driven optimization.

· Stakeholder partnership: Collaborate with Trading, Security, Infra, and Application teams to meet latency, throughput, and availability requirements.

Required Qualifications

· Extensive experience (typically 12+ years) designing and operating mission-critical, low-latency global networks; 5+ years leading teams.

· Mastery of routing/switching and protocols: BGP, OSPF/IS-IS, MPLS, EVPN/VXLAN, QoS, Multicast (PIM/IGMP); data center fabrics (leaf-spine) across NX-OS/EOS/IOS-XE or equivalent.

· Security depth with next-gen firewalls (Palo Alto/Fortinet/Check Point), F5/NGINX load balancing, DDoS mitigation, PKI/TLS, segmentation, and NAC.

· Proven IaC/automation with Terraform/Ansible and Python/Go; CI/CD for network (pipelines, testing, policy gates).

· Strong monitoring/observability: SNMP/telemetry, flow analysis, packet capture, synthetic probes; tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, CloudWatch, ThousandEyes, Kentik.

· Cloud networking in AWS (plus GCP/Azure preferred) and hybrid interconnects (Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink).

· Certifications such as CCIE (preferred) and/or CISSP (or equivalent).

· Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and decision-making in fast-paced trading environments.

Nice to Have

· Market/exchange connectivity (cross-connects, colocation), market data entitlements, and low-latency network tuning.

· SD-WAN, microsegmentation, ZTNA/SASE, and automation frameworks (Nornir/Netmiko/NAPALM).

· Compliance frameworks (SOC 2, NIST, CIS) and automated compliance scanning.

· Scripting for operational tooling (CLIs, bots, self-service runbooks).

About the Firm

This World Leading Hedge Fund employs a global, multi-strategy investment approach and is committed to delivering superior risk-adjusted returns while upholding the highest ethical standards and investing in the growth of its people and technology.