Edge Networking Engineer

Edge Networking Engineer (Contract)

£550-600 per day | 6 months | Remote / Hybrid | Start: ASAP

The opportunity

A leading national broadcaster is separating part of its business, and it needs experienced Edge Networking Engineers to make sure every retained site has clean, independent access infrastructure by Day 1.

You’ll design, build, migrate and separate edge network services across a large estate of offices, production areas and broadcast environments. The work spans Cisco Catalyst 9000, Nexus and Meraki platforms, and you’ll work closely with the core routing, automation and tooling, and platform/identity teams.

What you’ll do

Build and migrate site edge switching

• Design and deploy Layer 2 access and distribution switching at retained sites, including office floors, build rooms and specialist environments
• Migrate existing switch configurations to the new VLAN, addressing and uplink designs, with uplinks to the new core switches at each site
• Configure distribution switching for production environments (storage, media production, transcoding) in coordination with core routing

Support production and broadcast networks

• Deliver edge switching for media production platforms (Avid/Nexus), storage (Isilon/NAS), transcoding, and specialist news and broadcast production
• Integrate production networks with the new routing domains, and migrate or re-home production edge stacks as the separation design requires

Deploy Meraki SD-WAN, LAN and wireless

• Deploy and migrate Meraki MX (SD-WAN), MS (switching) and MR (wireless) at retained sites, including moves between Meraki organisations and networks
• Manage Dashboard templates for multi-site standardisation

Deliver wireless and NAC

• Deploy wireless on Meraki or Juniper Mist, migrate SSIDs and RADIUS policies to new identity services, and support surveys with Ekahau or similar
• Configure 802.1X, MAB fallback, VLAN assignment and guest access on edge ports with NAC platforms such as Cisco ISE
• Work with the identity team to separate authentication and authorisation policies and enforce entity boundaries

Clean up the divested estate

• Remove retained-entity VLANs, SVIs and access policies from divested-entity switches, and realign their uplinks to the divested core
• Leave divested-entity edge configuration clean and operationally ready for Day 1

What you’ll bring

Essential

• Strong Cisco Catalyst 9000 experience (9200, 9300, 9500), with solid VLAN, trunking, EtherChannel and spanning tree (RSTP/MST) knowledge
• Distribution layer and L3 boundary design, plus stacking and resilient access designs
• Familiarity with Nexus platforms (93180, 9336, 9348) in production or data centre edge environments
• Meraki MX, MS and MR experience, including Dashboard, templates and migrating sites to or from Meraki
• Enterprise wireless deployment (Meraki and/or Mist): SSID design, RF planning, roaming, WPA2/3-Enterprise and RADIUS integration
• 802.1X wired and wireless authentication, Cisco ISE or equivalent, RADIUS/TACACS+, and guest access, profiling and posture
• Large-scale site migration or refresh experience, with detailed migration plans, rollback procedures and disciplined change management
• Git and GitHub daily, working Python, and comfort with YAML, JSON and Jinja2; able to use CI/CD network change pipelines and familiar with Terraform
• Solid IP addressing, subnetting and DHCP relay, network monitoring (SNMP, syslog) and hands-on installation skills (rack and stack, patching)

Helpful to have

• Network separation or divestiture experience
• Broadcast or production network knowledge (media production, NAS, video contribution)
• Nautobot or similar IPAM/DCIM tools
• Nornir, NAPALM or Terraform automation experience
• Juniper Mist wired and wireless
• CCNP Enterprise or equivalent
• PoE budgeting and power management

How we work

• Agile, two-week sprints, with all code and configuration through GitHub pull requests and peer review
• Collaboration via Slack, Google Meet and Jira
• Low-level designs, working papers and decision records in Confluence and Google Drive, with diagrams in Miro and Draw.io (C4 conventions)
• Design decisions aligned to the programme’s design assurance framework
• AI-assisted tooling (Gemini, NotebookLM, GitHub Copilot, Kiro) is encouraged to speed up delivery

Why this role

• A high-profile, genuinely complex divestiture, not routine BAU
• Varied work across offices, production and broadcast environments
• Modern engineering practice, with CI/CD-driven network changes
• Remote-friendly, with a strong day rate