Network Lead

Position
:

Network Lead

Location
:
Santa Ana, CA - onsite role.
** Not a remote opportunity**

Pacific Standard Time hours

Compensation
:

* Actual compensation may vary from posting based on geographic location, work experience, education, and/or skill level.

Position Summary:

The Network Lead provides day-to-day technical and project leadership for the Network team, serving as the working link between Management and technical subject matter experts (SMEs). This role oversees network and cloud networking projects, manages team resources and work coordination, and ensures network capacity, resiliency, and security of offices, cloud, and AI network infrastructure.

The Network Lead also serves as acting manager in the network manager’s absence. The position is designed to take on increasing management responsibility, support continuity of team leadership, and develop the skills needed to move into a management role. The role requires a technically credible, highly organized leader who combines strong cloud and network expertise with project management discipline, clear communication, a passion for developing people, and a commitment to delivering changes and project rollouts with minimal disruption.

Disclaimer
:
Identity Verification checks are in place throughout the Candidate journey to prevent candidate fraud.

• Oversee planning, prioritization, and delivery of network and cloud network projects, including scope, timelines, milestones, dependencies, and risks.
• Track project and initiative status; report progress, risks, and resource needs to the Manager, and elevate issues that threaten quality, scope, or schedule.
• Coordinate project work with cloud, infrastructure, security, application, and Infrastructure as Code teams, as well as business stakeholders and third-party vendors.
• Build resiliency, redundancy, and rollback considerations into project designs and implementation plans from the outset.
• Drive continuous improvement of network processes and standards to maintain a consistent, standardized environment across all network and cloud network services.

• Assign, balance, and track work across Network Architects, Network Engineers, and Network Administrators based on priorities, skills, and capacity.
• Monitor the team’s ticket queues and escalations to ensure timely resolution; serve as the escalation point above the engineering team for complex or high-impact issues.
• Coordinate on-call and 24/7 coverage, schedules, and workload across the hybrid cloud network team and offshore teams.
• Partner with the Manager on capacity planning, staffing needs, vendor resources, and budget inputs.
• Coordinate vendor engagements, service delivery, and escalations to ensure network services are delivered as contracted.

• Lead the planning and execution of network and cloud network changes with a focus on minimizing disruption to business operations, end users, and dependent services.
• Ensure all changes follow the established change management process, including documented change requests, risk and impact assessments, peer review, and Change Advisory Board (CAB) approval.
• Require detailed implementation, validation, and rollback plans for every change; confirm rollback steps can be executed quickly if issues arise.
• Schedule changes within approved maintenance windows and coordinate timing with business stakeholders, application owners, and offshore teams to avoid peak business periods such as month-end and high-volume lending cycles.
• Favor low-risk deployment approaches, such as lab or pre-production validation, pilot groups, phased rollouts, and redundant-path or failover-based cutovers, to achieve zero- or minimal-downtime…