Senior Engineer

Vodafone Three - Senior Engineer (Packet Core Services)

Location: Newbury+ Hybrid

Working Hours: Full time 37.5 hours per week – Mon to Fri

What you’ll do

The Network Engineering function is accountable for the design, delivery, and lifecycle management of the operator’s core network, ensuring secure, scalable, and high-performance connectivity that underpins all consumer and enterprise services.

Within this function, the Data Services domain provides engineering leadership for the platforms that enable subscriber mobility, secure interconnection, differentiated services, and high-capacity data transport. These include signalling and mobility platforms, gateway functions, policy and charging systems, and packet core services. Together, they form the foundation of the operator’s ability to deliver world-class connectivity experiences across 4G, 5G, IoT, and enterprise solutions.

A Senior Engineer within the Packet services team will be responsible for the design, performance, and lifecycle management of the 2G, 4G, and 5GC elements and architectures within the Data Core domain. The role will involve working closely with business stakeholders, strategy and architecture teams, and delivery and operational partners to ensure solutions meet business requirements and are deployed successfully into the Vodafone Three core network.

• Work with the Packet Core Senior managers to define technology and lifecycle management roadmap for the packet core platforms, such as MME/AMF, GGSN, PGW/UPF, IPX/GRX gateways, Gi/SGi-LAN, carrier-grade NAT, security gateways, DNS, interconnect gateways, and drive evolution from legacy platforms to cloud-native, software-defined, and virtualised solutions in line with 5G core architecture.
• Ensure platform capabilities align with enterprise, IoT, and consumer data service demands, including private networks and MEC.
• Lead the design, build, integration, and acceptance of platforms and services into the live network.
• Ensure platforms are engineered for scale, performance, and security, meeting customer and regulatory expectations.
• Oversee interworking across domains (core, IP transport, signalling/mobility, security) for seamless end-to-end services.
• Drive innovation and efficiency through automation, traffic optimisation, and policy-driven architectures.
• Partner with Operations to assure stability, resilience, and proactive risk management.
• Establish and monitor KPIs for platform and network performance, including session setup success, latency, throughput, resilience, roaming performance, security posture, and service continuity, and participate in incident investigations and problem management for gateway-related issues.
• Collaborate closely with L4 leaders and L5 to ensure coherent end-to-end engineering.
• Support commercial and regulatory engagements involving roaming, interconnect, data offload, and peering.

Who you are

• Ability to deliver complex engineering programs on time, within scope, and to high quality standards.
• Deep knowledge of core gateway functions such as MME/AMF, SGSN, GGSN, PGW, SGW, UPF, IPX/GRX, Gi/SGi-LAN, NAT, DPI.
• Excellent working knowledge of 2G, LTE, and 5
  
  GSA data networks on an end-to-end basis.
• Strong understanding of data plane optimisation, traffic steering, QoS, and policy management.
• Familiarity with interconnect frameworks, roaming architecture, peering, and data offload solutions.
• Expertise in NFV, cloud-native network functions, containerisation (Kubernetes), and automation (Ansible, CI/CD).

What we offer

We care about our people’s success by offering great pay, bonuses, up to 28 days off plus bank holidays, and paid time for charity work. You can personalise our benefits for you and your family, like discounts, vouchers, a pension plan and more. We provide learning tools and top-notch parental leave policies.

Need to know

We are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and all offers of employment for this role are subject to background checks, including criminal (DBS) and financial checks to meet regulator standards.

We have identified a range of reasonable adjustments to help you feel comfortable during the interview process. If you require any reasonable adjustments or have an accessibility request, please contact your recruiter directly or email  for guidance.