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NETWORK SECURITY
Network security engineer recruitment
Network security is treated as a mature discipline with a settled candidate pool, and that is no longer true. The estate is moving to SASE and identity-based access while the on-premise estate still needs running, and engineers who are credible in both directions are the ones worth competing for.
What we place
- FIREWALL ENGINEER
- Policy design, rule base hygiene and migrations across Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point and Cisco estates.
- SASE / ZTNA ENGINEER
- Secure access service edge and zero-trust access rollouts, and the VPN decommissioning that should follow.
- SEGMENTATION SPECIALIST
- Micro and macro segmentation programmes: discovery, phasing, and the application owners who cannot say what talks to what.
- NETWORK SECURITY ARCHITECT
- Target-state network security design. Also covered on our architecture page.
- NAC & ACCESS CONTROL
- Network access control, certificate-based onboarding and the guest and contractor cases that break it.
- SECURE CONNECTIVITY
- Site-to-site and cloud interconnect security, SD-WAN, and remote access at scale.
How we screen
We ask about a migration or a segmentation phase, not a product list. Useful answers include what the discovery found, what was deliberately left alone, and which outage was caused by the change. Engineers who have only maintained a stable rule base answer this thinly.
We also probe cloud fluency. A network security engineer who cannot reason about security groups, private endpoints and cloud routing will be increasingly sidelined, and employers hiring for a five-year role should test it even when the estate is largely on-premise today.
The market, honestly
This is the one security discipline where South African supply is reasonably deep, largely because of a long history of strong network engineering in banking, telecoms and mining. Vendor certification is common and genuine skill is easier to verify than in most disciplines.
The gap is at the transition. Engineers with real SASE, ZTNA and cloud networking delivery experience are scarce in both markets, and employers running that programme should expect to pay for it or plan to develop it internally.
Rule base cleanup, SASE rollout and cloud network design are three different jobs. Most briefs ask for all three; we help decide which one the first hire owns.
Where we recruit
Cape Town and Johannesburg across South Africa, and London and the wider United Kingdom.
Common questions
Which vendors do you recruit for?
Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point and Cisco most often, with Zscaler, Netskope and Cloudflare appearing on SASE briefs. Multi-vendor engineers are common in South Africa and are usually the safer hire.
Is network security still a growth area?
The on-premise perimeter work is shrinking; secure access, segmentation and cloud networking are growing. Candidates who have made that shift are in demand, and those who have not tend to be undervalued relative to their skill.
Do you place engineers for segmentation programmes?
Yes, including contract work. Segmentation is a discovery and negotiation problem more than a technical one, and we screen for the patience it requires.
Do these roles suit network engineers moving into security?
Frequently, and it is one of the better routes in. Strong network engineers with a genuine interest in security transfer well; we are clear with clients when we are presenting that profile.
Related disciplines
Talk to us about your search
A short conversation is usually enough to tell you whether we can help.