Back to engineering…

and getting my hands dirty again!

After leaving a Network Engineering (and later a Network Architect) role at a New Zealand based ISP and moving into a pre-sales role at NEC New Zealand Limited, I was missing being an operational engineer. Whilst the pre-sales side of the business did indeed bring some interesting challenges and opportunities, it made me realise that I really missed building networks, and overcoming technical challenges.

NEC gave me almost two and a half years of working on a great number of projects, some of which spanned multiple countries within Asia and had some very interesting scale challenges (think 1.2Tbps of NAT). I had the opportunity to build or design some very cool networks to meet customer requirements, both with Juniper Networks equipment, as well as security focused projects with Palo Alto.

I also had the opportunity to work with the wider NEC group over in Europe, Japan, Singapore and Thailand but the amount of hands-on was limited to a relatively small percentage and I spent a great deal of time travelling. Being based in New Zealand meant that a typical trip to Thailand involved 20 hours of travelling from door to door.

I am very thankful to have landed a fantastic opportunity to join a small New Zealand company focused on delivering outstanding networking, security and managed service solutions. As a Senior Network and Security Engineer I am responsible for architecting customer solutions to resolve problems as well as increase security postures. Being back at the sharp end of networking has rekindled my love for the industry and I am very much looking forward to the next few months, and hopefully many happy years at NSP.

The possibilities are endless and some very, very cool tech is being rolled out to address some pretty interesting use cases – especially in light of recent security and government mandates.

Short post but one that should generate many in-depth tech artcicles in the coming weeks and months!