Infrastructure Network Engineer

If you have ever watched a BGP session flap at 2am and felt curiosity rather than dread, keep reading.

Who and why

Vetta Group is an award-winning, end-to-end technology provider working across IT Services, Telecommunications, Cybersecurity, and Payments. We support businesses of all shapes and sizes across New Zealand, and unlike many tech providers, we own and operate our own national carrier network rather than reselling someone else's.

That network is the thing you would be helping to run. We are looking for an Infrastructure Network Engineer, based in Auckland, to join our Infrastructure team - watching the network, responding when it misbehaves, deploying the next piece of it, and getting hands on in our data centres and exchanges both in Auckland and around the country.

This is a hybrid role. Some of the work can be done from home with a decent screen and a good coffee, but this is not a fully remote job. You will be in the office, in data centres, in exchanges, and occasionally on a customer site, so you need to be Auckland-based and mobile.

We are open on level. If you are a junior to intermediate network engineer with carrier or service provider exposure, great. If you are a recent graduate who has been running your own AS in a lab since you were sixteen and can explain every design decision in it, we want to hear from you too. Passion over credentials is a value we actually mean.

Our Values

• Don't be a jerk

• Get stuff done

• Passion over credentials

• Set really high standards

• Keep ahead of the curve

• Love what you do

• Take ownership

• Put customers first

A day in the life

Curious what a day in the life of this role looks like? A normal day looks something like the below:

• Start with a fresh cup of Java - not the programming language - and a sweep of overnight alerting to see what the network got up to while you were asleep

• Triage and respond to live alerts across routing, switching, transport and access layers, working out what is actually broken versus what is just noise

• Own incidents end to end: identify, contain, fix, then write up what happened and what stops it happening again

• Build and deploy new network configuration, from edge and aggregation gear through to customer premises equipment

• Head to an Auckland data centre or exchange for hardware standups, cross connects, optic swaps and cabling you would be happy to photograph

• Jump on a flight or a road trip for works at our sites elsewhere in the country

• Pitch in with the wider Infrastructure team on server builds, virtualisation, data centre maintenance, backup testing and whatever else the stack needs that week

• Pick up escalations from our Service Desk when something is bigger than a ticket, and be the on-site response when someone needs to physically be there

• Tune alerting and monitoring so the next person on shift gets a cleaner signal than you did

• Document what you built so nobody has to reverse engineer it later

• Get involved in Slack - ideas, feedback, war stories, and yes, the #random channel

About you

• Solid understanding of core networking concepts, and the ability to reason from first principles rather than from a single vendor's documentation

• Comfortable with dynamic routing, internal and external, and with how carrier-grade protocols behave at scale rather than just in a textbook

• Calm under pressure and methodical when something is down, working the problem instead of guessing at it

• Practically minded and happy to do the physical work - racking, cabling, fibre, optics and hardware standups

• Equally comfortable at a desk, in a data centre, and in front of a customer

• Clear communicator who can explain a fault to an engineer and to a business owner in the same afternoon

• Self-directed and organised enough to be trusted with a hybrid arrangement, and genuinely takes ownership of your work

• Curious about the rest of the stack, not just the bits with ports on them

We are seeking an individual with the following skills:

• Core: IP routing and switching fundamentals, BGP and an IGP (OSPF or IS-IS), route policy and filtering, VLANs and 802.1Q, IPv4 and IPv6 addressing and subnetting, layer 1 and layer 2 troubleshooting, structured cabling and fibre practice, optics and transceiver basics, clear technical documentation

• Highly valuable: MikroTik, Arista and Cisco platforms, network monitoring and alerting tooling, MPLS and L2VPN / L3VPN services, VPLS or EVPN, QinQ and service provider VLAN stacking, BNG and subscriber access (PPPoE / IPoE), RADIUS, VRRP or similar redundancy, DWDM and transport, Linux fundamentals, server and virtualisation exposure

• Bonus points: MTCNA / MTCRE or higher, CCNA or equivalent, Arista ACE, scripting or automation (Python, Ansible, bash), FRR or white-box routing, IXP and peering experience, exposure to NZ wholesale layer 2 services, a home lab you can talk about at length

Full clean New Zealand driver's licence, able to pass an MoJ check, and existing rights to work in New Zealand are required. You will be part of the after-hours alerting response rotation, and there will be travel to our sites nationwide plus out-of-hours change windows to keep customer impact to a minimum.

This is a role with real depth to it. You will be working on a network we actually own, alongside people who will happily explain the why as well as the how, with the freedom to dig into problems properly rather than raising a ticket with an upstream provider and waiting.

A competitive remuneration package will be tailored to your skills and experience, alongside the full range of perks that come with being part of the Vetta team.