About the role
You will design, build and operate the networks that our banking, energy and government clients depend on. That means campus LAN and data center fabric, multi-site SD-WAN, high-density wireless and the routing that connects it all, on kit from Cisco, Aruba, Fortinet, Juniper, Huawei and MikroTik.
This is a senior engineering role, not a supervisory one. You will be the person who produces the low-level design, leads the cutover at two in the morning, and writes the as-built pack that the client's own team will work from afterwards. You will also mentor two or three junior engineers, because that is how the practice grows.
You will report to the Head of Network Practice and work from our Erbil office, with travel to client sites across the Kurdistan Region and occasionally to Baghdad and Basra.
What you will do
- Run site surveys and produce documented current-state assessments before anything is quoted.
- Write low-level designs: VLAN and VRF schemes, IP addressing, routing policy, QoS, redundancy and failure analysis.
- Build and stage equipment in our lab, then lead out-of-hours cutovers with a tested rollback plan.
- Own the acceptance testing that proves the design does what the client signed for.
- Produce the handover pack: as-built diagrams, port schedules, configuration backups and runbooks.
- Act as the escalation point for the NOC on complex network incidents.
- Support pre-sales with sizing, bill of materials and technical clarification on tenders.
- Mentor junior engineers and review their designs before they go to a client.
What we are looking for
- Five or more years designing and operating enterprise or service provider networks.
- CCNP Enterprise or equivalent. CCIE, or genuine progress towards it, is a strong advantage.
- Deep working knowledge of switching, OSPF and BGP, first-hop redundancy, and QoS applied in practice rather than in theory.
- Hands-on SD-WAN experience on at least one major platform.
- Firewall competence, ideally Fortinet or Palo Alto, enough to design zones and read a rule base critically.
- Wireless design experience, including surveys, not just access point installation.
- The habit of documenting as you build. We will ask to see something you have written.
- Working English, plus Arabic or Kurdish (Sorani).
- Willingness to work planned out-of-hours cutovers, which are compensated and rostered.
Nice to have
- MPLS or segment routing in a service provider environment.
- Automation with Ansible, Python or NETCONF for configuration and backup.
- Data center fabric experience, whether spine-leaf, VXLAN or ACI.
- Exposure to a regulated environment such as banking, and the change control that comes with it.
What we offer
- Sponsored certification: exam fees, official training and study time in working hours. We have funded over 140 certifications, including at CCIE level.
- A real lab in Erbil with racked kit from every vendor we sell, available to book and to break.
- Rostered and compensated on-call, with a day off after a night cutover rather than a normal Monday.
- A published competency framework for the network track, so you know exactly what the next level requires.
- Health cover for you and your dependants, transport allowance, project bonuses and 22 days of leave that we expect you to take.
- Relocation support and residency paperwork if you are moving to Erbil.
How the interview works. A technical conversation with two engineers about work you have actually done, then a paid two-hour lab exercise with us in the room. No unpaid take-home projects and no eight-round loops. You will hear back either way within five working days of each stage.
How to apply
Send your CV to careers@oktagate.com with the subject line "Application: Senior Network Engineer". If you can, include a short note about a network you designed and one thing you would do differently now. That tells us more than a list of technologies.
OKTAGATE hires on ability. We welcome applications regardless of gender, background or religion, and we will make reasonable adjustments to our process on request.