Network Automation and Reliability Engineer

Our client is seeking a highly accomplished and hands-on Network Automation and Reliability Engineer with deep expertise in large-scale network engineering, automation, and observability. This individual will serve as a technical subject matter expert (SME) responsible for designing, building, and maintaining automation frameworks that enhance the reliability, scalability, and security of CLIENT’s global network infrastructure.

The ideal candidate will combine strong foundational networking knowledge with advanced automation and coding skills to drive innovation across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. He/she is a senior technical leader who thrives on building, coding, and solving complex network challenges.

Strat client Leadership and Vision:

• Define and execute the long-term strategy for network automation, reliability, and observability across global data centers, cloud, and hybrid environments.
• Drive the transformation of network operations through automation, resilience engineering, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with senior stakeholders across Technology Group (TG) to align network strategy with enterprise architecture and digital transformation initiatives.
• Champion a culture of automation-first and reliability engineering across the network organization.

Network Automation and Engineering Excellence:

• Design, develop, and maintain production-grade automation frameworks using Ansible, Python, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Build reusable Ansible collections, Python libraries, and REST API integrations for network and security platforms.
• Implement GitOps practices for network configuration management, including version control, automated testing, and continuous deployment.
• Integrate automation workflows with enterprise DevOps toolchains (e.g., GitHub, Ansible, Terraform, ITSM tools).
• Develop automated validation and rollback mechanisms for network changes.
• Perform hands-on development, testing, and deployment of automation workflows in production environments.
• Act as the escalation point for complex network automation and reliability issues, performing deep-dive troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
• Evaluate and implement emerging automation technologies to enhance scalability, reliability, and efficiency.

Foundational Network Architecture and Operations:

• Serve as the SME for core network domains — routing, switching, firewalls, load balancing, WAN optimization, and hybrid cloud connectivity.
• Provide architectural oversight for critical network platforms including Cisco, Checkpoint, Palo Alto, F5, Zscaler, Symantec, and AWS.
• Lead modernization initiatives to ensure high availability, security, and performance across the global network.
• Drive capacity planning, performance optimization, and lifecycle management to maintain operational excellence.
• Establish and enforce network reliability standards, ensuring minimal downtime and rapid recovery from incidents.

Firewall and Security Automation:

• Develop and maintain automation for firewall policy management, rule lifecycle, and compliance validation across Checkpoint, Palo Alto, Cisco, and cloud-native firewalls.
• Integrate firewall automation workflows with change management and compliance systems (e.g., AlgoSec, ITSM tools).
• Collaborate with Cybersecurity teams to embed security controls and compliance into network automation and operational processes.

Observability, Tooling, and Reliability Engineering:

• Design and implement observability pipelines for network telemetry (e.g., streaming telemetry, SNMP, NetFlow, sFlow) integrated with Grafana, Prometheus, and ELK.
• Automate health checks, anomaly detection, and self-healing workflows using observability data.
• Collaborate with SRE and platform teams to define and implement network SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Develop automated testing frameworks for network configuration validation, compliance checks, and pre-deployment simulati