Network Manager

The Network Manager owns the networking function and the team that runs it. This seat is accountable for network reliability, capacity, and secure connectivity across the estate - LAN, WAN, wireless, datacenter fabric, and cloud interconnect - and delivers it by leading people and governing the design, not by sitting the CLI. The core of the job is fourfold: manage the network engineers and network-operations staff (hire, coach, set performance standards, grow the bench and the on-call rota); govern the network architecture and change standard (approve designs, set the build and change bar, hold the capacity plan); own the carrier, circuit, and network-hardware vendor relationships and contracts; and own the network budget and refresh sequencing. It is a people-management seat reporting to a Head of IT / Infrastructure or a CIO, with a team below (see subordinate-roles.md). It is not the network engineer IC who does the day-to-day routing / switching configuration (this seat governs the standard those changes are built to and leads the people who build them), not the IT Manager who runs general internal IT - end-user computing, the service desk, IT systems - for a different team, a different vendor set, and a different technical domain, not the Security team who owns the security program and accepts security risk (this seat sets connectivity and segmentation intent and partners), and not the cloud / SRE function that runs the customer-facing product network (the focus here is the internal corporate and datacenter network). Performance is visible in network uptime, latency and performance against target, and incident recurrence - so better leadership and governance produce measurable connectivity the business can feel. What separates great from average is building a network team and a design standard that keep the estate reliable without the manager in the packets: a change-governance discipline where every risky change is peer-reviewed, windowed, config-backed-up, and rollback-ready before anyone touches a device; a capacity plan that provisions circuits and links ahead of the utilization curve instead of after the saturation outage; carrier relationships managed for lead-time, SLA, and path diversity rather than lowest invoice; and engineers who are coached to a higher bar and an on-call rota that is not one hero. A mediocre manager jumps on the console during every incident and leaves the team un-grown and the architecture undocumented; a great one runs the incident as a commander, turns the recurring failure into a standard, and makes the next outage someone else's well-drilled runbook.