Your Opportunity as Lead Engineer, IS Network Services

The Lead Network Engineer is responsible for the design, implementation, operation, and continuous improvement of enterprise network services that support The J.M. Smucker Company’s business operations. This role serves as a technical leader within IS Infrastructure, providing hands-on engineering, architectural direction, and operational oversight across campus, data center, cloud, and manufacturing/operations technology (OT) connected networks. The Lead Network Engineer acts as an escalation point for complex network issues, drives standards and best practices, and partners closely with security, compute, application, and OT teams.

Location: Orrville, OH (Close proximity to Cleveland/Akron)

Work Arrangements: Hybrid - onsite a minimum of 9 days a month primarily during core weeks as determined by the Company; maybe more as business need requires.

In this role you will:

• Provide technical leadership for enterprise network services, including LAN, WAN, SD-WAN, wireless, internet edge, and data center connectivity.

• Design, implement, and support highly available, resilient network architectures aligned to business, security, and manufacturing requirements.

• Serve as a senior escalation point for complex network incidents, outages, and performance issues; lead root cause analysis and corrective actions.

• Lead lifecycle management for network infrastructure, including hardware refreshes, software upgrades, and decommissioning of legacy platforms.

• Partner with IS Security to design, integrate, and enforce network security controls—including OT/IT segmentation, firewall policy, secure remote access, and zero trust principles—to reduce risk across corporate and manufacturing environments.

• Design, implement, and support modern data center fabrics and overlays (e.g., EVPN/VXLAN) to enable scalable, multi-tenant connectivity.

• Collaborate with cloud and infrastructure teams on hybrid connectivity patterns supporting SaaS and cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud).

• Administer and troubleshoot network load balancing services (e.g., F5 BIG-IP LTM) to support high availability and application delivery.

• Partner with security teams to implement and operate network access control (NAC) and/or micro-segmentation platforms (e.g., Illumio) to enforce policy and reduce lateral movement risk.

• Develop and maintain network documentation, diagrams, runbooks, and operational procedures.

• Drive automation and standardization using modern tooling and scripting where appropriate.

• Participate in disaster recovery and business continuity planning, testing, and execution.

The Right Place for You

We are bold, kind, strive to do the right thing, we play to win, and we believe in a strong community that thrives together. Our culture is rooted in our Basic Beliefs, and we believe in supporting every employee by meeting their physical, emotional, and financial needs.

What we are looking for:

Minimum Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in enterprise network engineering roles

• Strong hands-on experience designing and supporting complex enterprise networks

• Experience operating SD-WAN, firewalls, and large-scale routed and switched environments

• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex, multi-domain network issues

• Proficiency with network operating systems and CLI troubleshooting (e.g., Cisco IOS/NX-OS and Juniper Junos)

• Strong documentation, communication, and collaboration skills

• Ability to participate in on-call rotational schedule (after hours support)

Additional Skills and experience that we think would make someone successful in this role (not required):

• Experience with network automation, scripting, or infrastructure-as-code concepts

• Experience with cloud networking in AWS, Oracle & Microsoft

• Experience with data center switching and overlay technologies (e.g., EVPN/VXLAN) and associated operational troubleshooting

• Experience with application delivery controllers / load balancers (e.g., F5 BIG-IP LTM), including VIPs, pools, health monitors, and SSL/TLS concepts

• Familiarity with NAC and/or micro-segmentation solutions (e.g., Illumio) and how they integrate with network security controls.

• Experience in manufacturing or OT-connected environments

• Familiarity with zero trust networking concepts and modern security architectures

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