Network Engineer

Senior Network Engineer — Brussels (hybrid) — B2B contract, 2 years

• Location: Brussels, hybrid — 3 days onsite, 2 days remote
• Contract: B2B / freelance, 24 months (long-term engagement with renewal potential)
• Eligibility: EU citizenship required due to project sensitivity

About the role

A large international organisation is expanding its ICT infrastructure team in Brussels and is looking for a Senior Network Engineer to help run, modernise and secure a mission-critical network, data centre and hybrid cloud estate.

This is a hands-on senior position rather than a pure operations seat. You'll own complex incidents at 3rd level, but you'll also shape how the network is built and automated — assessing new technologies, leading migrations, and moving the team away from manual configuration towards infrastructure-as-code and pipeline-driven change. The environment is multilingual and highly collaborative, with specialists across networking, security and infrastructure working side by side.

The engagement is scoped at two years, so this suits someone who wants continuity and the chance to see modernisation work through, rather than a short project hop.

What you'll be doing

Operations and service delivery — running critical network and security services, handling complex incidents and 3rd-level escalations, coordinating with vendor support, contributing to problem management and root-cause analysis, and monitoring service quality against SLAs. You'll also help define operational metrics and drive continuous improvement.

Engineering and architecture — designing and evaluating new network and security solutions, running technical assessments and proofs of concept, defining target architectures, recommending technologies, leading migrations and supervising deployments. Performance analysis, optimisation and capacity forecasting sit here too.

Automation — building and maintaining infrastructure-as-code, implementing network automation frameworks and CI/CD pipelines, and developing operational tooling, integrations and management platforms to modernise how the network is operated.

Configuration and lifecycle — maintaining configuration standards and operational procedures, supporting platform lifecycle management, ensuring compliance and backup strategy, and producing technical documentation and training material.

What we're looking for

• Substantial experience operating enterprise-scale network and security infrastructure in an SLA-driven environment
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL and ICT service management practice
• A track record of designing, deploying and running complex network and data centre infrastructure
• Comfort operating at 3rd level on genuinely complex incidents, including vendor escalation
• Vendor certifications are valued
• EU citizenship, and the ability to be onsite in Brussels three days a week

Technical stack

Ansible, Python, GitLab CI/CD, NetBox, infrastructure-as-code, network automation and orchestration, container networking (Kubernetes, Docker), eBPF, hybrid cloud integration, enterprise configuration management and compliance tooling.