Head of Networking

Head of Networking

RHAELM | Infrastructure & SRE | EMEA & APAC | Flexible location, HQ preferred

About RHAELM

RHAELM is the sovereign AI cloud built to accelerate secure AI deployment at scale, combining power and infrastructure pipelines with global capability and local, in-country operations. Headquartered in London, with deployments across Europe and APAC, we deliver ring-fenced compute, networking, and storage infrastructure alongside a sovereign platform and flexible Bare Metal, Kubernetes, and AI-as-a-Service models. Focused on regulated and mission-critical sectors including Government, Defence, Healthcare, and Financial Services, we give organisations sovereign control over their AI infrastructure, platform, and data.

This Role

You will own RHAELM’s network architecture and define how the network is run, from design standards and change control to monitoring and incident response. That covers our bare metal, Kubernetes and GPU/AI hosting environments across every site and region.

This is a technical leadership seat within the SRE team, reporting to the SVP of Operations. You will work closely with Engineering to design the platform, set shared standards and establish escalation paths as Operations scales. In the interim, you will also own infrastructure design, architecture and escalations. You will build the Network Engineering team from a standing start, and shape its structure and playbook. Expect regular travel across EMEA and APAC, including to network infrastructure locations and our Global NOC hub in Poland.

Key Responsibilities

• Own network architecture end-to-end, designing a consistent topology across bare metal, Kubernetes and GPU/AI environments

• Define change control and approval procedures, monitoring and alerting standards, incident response playbooks and network runbooks

• Build and lead the Network Engineering team, hiring and developing engineers as the function scales

• Own the network side of client-facing escalations from Support, with clear response expectations

• Partner with Engineering on shared technical standards, documentation practices and escalation paths

• Represent the Network function in cross-team design and escalation work

• Report on network health and performance

• Build a culture of technical rigour, documentation-first thinking and continuous improvement from day one

Experience

• 7+ years of hands-on network engineering experience, including several years in a leadership role at a hosting, colocation, cloud infrastructure or managed services company

• Deep background in data centre network architecture and design: routing and switching, topology and capacity planning at multi-site scale

• Experience defining network change management, monitoring and incident response from scratch, rather than only within an established framework

• Familiarity with bare metal provisioning, Kubernetes and GPU/AI hosting, enough to ground architecture and staffing decisions in the platform

• Comfortable owning hands-on triage of non-client-facing infrastructure incidents beyond pure networking, and coordinating with adjacent teams such as Storage & Backup Engineering

• Experience working with IT and customer support teams on incident escalation and change coordination

Skills

• Technical leadership and the ability to scale a function from a single leader into a dedicated team

• Network design, routing and switching, and capacity planning

• Clear communication, including reporting progress to senior leadership

• Cross-functional partnership without direct line management

• Experience with ITSM, ticketing or network monitoring and observability platforms (desirable)

• Experience with GPU/AI infrastructure (desirable)

• Polish and/or Japanese language skills (desirable)

Qualifications

• CCNP, CCIE or equivalent data centre networking credentials (desirable)