Network Engineering Lead - Kitchener, ON

We're hiring a Network Engineering Lead to own the design, evolution, and day-to-day operation of a multi-business production network. The environment spans ultra-low-latency trading paths, high-capacity and highly-redundant data movement, and connectivity to a wide range of external counter-parties across private and public networks.

This is an Individual Contributor role with tech-lead authority. You'll set technical direction, mentor a senior engineer reporting to you, and stay deeply hands-on with the gear. You'll work alongside a fully-staffed data center operations team that handles on-site work and tier-1 incident response — your focus is design, complex troubleshooting, and where the network goes next.

The network is brownfield: a working production fabric carrying real workloads. Your mandate is to take it to the next generation — tighter latency where it matters, more capacity and resilience where it matters, and a meaningfully better automation platform across the board.

• Own end-to-end network design and evolution — from layer-1 optics through routing, segmentation, and overlays.
• Operate a heterogeneous fabric: ultra-low-latency trading paths alongside redundant, high-bandwidth data planes and multi-tenant connectivity.
• Take our network automation to the next level. Drive the move toward a clean source of truth, CI/CD for network configuration, automated validation, and tooling your team will actually want to use.
• Manage and grow connectivity to exchanges, brokers, market-data providers, and other counter-parties — across proximity-hosted, colocated, and private/public network paths.
• Design and operate firewalls and segmentation across multiple security zones.
• Lead complex troubleshooting. Issues that escalate past tier-1 support land with you. Move fast, root-cause, and write it up.
• Set technical direction for the network: own the architecture roadmap, run design reviews, drive postmortems, and partner on hiring as the team grows.
• Mentor a senior engineer reporting to you. Raise the bar on review quality, change discipline, and engineering practices.
• Share a 24/7 on-call rotation with your direct report. Routine, known-solution incidents are handled by support staff.

• 10+ years operating production network infrastructure in environments where uptime and performance are first-order concerns.
• Strong end-to-end understanding of how networks actually work — every layer, not just the ones you touch most often.
• Deep hands-on experience with Arista and Cisco switching and routing platforms.
• Fluency with the protocols this environment runs on: BGP, OSPF, PIM-SM and IP multicast, VLAN, VXLAN, IPSec.
• Experience operating modern data-center fabrics — spine-leaf topologies and EVPN-VXLAN overlays.
• Working fluency with PTP and hardware timestamping; comfortable reasoning about clock distribution and time accuracy on the wire.
• Solid grasp of firewall architecture, configuration, and troubleshooting.
• Strong network design instincts — you know when to optimize for latency, when for capacity, when for redundancy, and how to make those trade-offs explicit and defensible.
• Fast, structured troubleshooting under pressure. Fluent with packet capture (PCAP), sFlow / streaming telemetry, and capture appliances (Corvil-style); able to reason from layer-1 first principles.
• Network automation experience (Python, Ansible, or equivalent) and the appetite to design and build the next generation — including source-of-truth tooling (NetBox or similar) and CI for network configuration.
• Working knowledge of the network-adjacent hardware stack: fiber, transceivers (SFP/QSFP), DWDM, muxes, and layer-1 switching.

Nice to Have

• Experience operating in a low-latency trading or financial-market-connectivity environment.
• Track record of evolving an existing automation platform — not just consuming one.
• Experience integrating AWS or Azure networking into a hybrid environment.
• Exposure to microwave / wireless low-latency links.
• Industry certifications (CCNP, CCIE, JNCIE, or equivalent) appreciated, not required.

We're proud to employ leading talent in the industry and work to ensure our employees enjoy a high quality of life.

Please note: The use of AI tools during interviews is strictly prohibited, unless explicitly agreed upon. 

Benefits:

Perks: Daily Meal Allowance, Equinox Corporate Membership Rate, Snacks, Casual Dress.

Hybrid Work Policy: 4 Days a Week in office, Fridays can be worked from home.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, or protected veteran status, and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

Unsolicited resumes:

We do not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with GTS.