JOB DESCRIPTION
You will define and scale the network automation strategy for a global, mission-critical infrastructure environment. You will own the architecture, standards, and execution model for automating network lifecycle operations across provisioning, configuration management, compliance, observability, remediation, and capacity workflows. A core mandate is to ensure approved software upgrades can be rolled out across the platform/service within 64 hours, with zero external partner impact.
What You Will Own
- Build and execute a multi-year network automation and orchestration roadmap aligned to reliability, speed, and partner continuity goals.
- Establish the engineering model for infrastructure-as-code and intent-based networking at scale.
- Design and govern automation platforms, APIs, data models, and control loops for network operations.
- Lead architecture and implementation of event-driven workflows for day-0/day-1/day-2 network changes and rapid upgrade delivery.
- Drive migration from manual and device-centric operations to declarative, policy-based lifecycle management.
- Define golden patterns, reusable modules, and quality gates for network automation pipelines.
- Partner with SRE, Security, Platform, Product, and Operations leaders to embed compliance, resiliency, and non-disruptive partner experiences by design.
- Mentor Lead and Senior engineers, set technical bar, and create a high-performance engineering culture.
Key Responsibilities
- Author technical strategy, reference architectures, and implementation standards for network automation and orchestrated upgrade delivery.
- Lead engineering delivery for orchestration systems integrating routers, switches, firewalls, cloud networking, and observability stacks.
- Define CI/CD and test automation practices for network code, including simulation, canarying, phased rollout, automatic rollback, and partner-impact validation.
- Champion closed-loop remediation and autonomous operations using telemetry and policy engines.
- Build and enforce release orchestration that enables approved software upgrades to production within 24 hours.
- Ensure upgrade execution is transparent and seamless to external partners, with no service degradation or interruption.
- Improve MTTR, change success rate, deployment velocity, and operational consistency through automation.
- Establish operational excellence metrics and executive-level reporting for automation program impact and upgrade SLA adherence.
- Influence vendor and open-source ecosystem decisions based on scalability, interoperability, reliability, and upgrade safety.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years in infrastructure engineering with at least 5+ years leading infrastructure or network automation at enterprise or service-provider scale.
- Proven leadership delivering production-grade network automation/orchestration platforms across multi-vendor environments.
- Demonstrated success designing zero-downtime or near-zero-downtime upgrade strategies for networked platforms serving external partners.
- Strong software engineering capability in Python or Go and API-first system design.
- Expertise with infrastructure-as-code and automation frameworks (for example: Ansible, Terraform, Nornir, NetBox, GitOps workflows).
- Experience building robust automation quality practices: versioning, testing, linting, peer review, release governance.
- Track record influencing senior stakeholders and leading cross-functional execution in global organizations.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with intent-based networking, source-of-truth systems, and model-driven telemetry.
- Familiarity with gNMI/NETCONF/RESTCONF or similar, message buses, and event-driven architecture patterns.
- Experience in hybrid cloud network automation and secure connectivity design and tools such as Nautobot.
- Deep knowledge of network protocols and architectures (BGP, OSPF/IS-IS, EVPN/VXLAN, MPLS, QoS, ACL/policy models).
- Prior people leadership for geographically distributed teams.
- English/Spanish bilingual collaboration capability is a plus.
Leadership Expectations
- Sets engineering vision and aligns teams around measurable business, reliability, and partner-experience outcomes.
- Balances strategic architecture with practical, incremental delivery.
- Raises quality standards and accountability across architecture, coding, release, and operations.
- Creates clarity in ambiguity and drives decisions with data and technical rigor.