{"id":2181469,"url":"https://alion.io/job/equinix-senior-software-engineer-network-automation-architect-2","title":"Senior Software Engineer - Network Automation Architect","company":{"id":7655,"name":"Equinix","domain":"equinix.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/equinix","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Dallas, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":136000,"max":204000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":204000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"BGP","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"MariaDB","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"OSPF","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":true},{"name":"GitLab CI","optional":true},{"name":"Jenkins","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-15T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T04:25:50Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":33,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":33},"description":"Who are we?\nEquinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, lifeand planet.\nA place where tech thinkers and future builders turn bold ideas into breakthrough experiences, we welcome your unique perspective.Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers-because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you-because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work.Senior Staff Software Engineer / Network Automation Architect\nBuild the Next Generation of Network Automation\nWe are seeking a highly experienced Senior Staff Software Engineer / Network Automation Architect to design and build the next generation of software that operates a large, globally distributed, multi-vendor production network.\nThis opportunity is designed for an engineer with a distinctive combination of experience:\nYou began your career working directly with routers, switches, routing protocols, network configurations, and production incidents.\nYou transitioned from traditional network engineering into software engineering and Python development.\nYou have designed and built network automation systems, not just individual scripts or playbooks.\nYou understand how software decisions affect live network devices and know how to automate change safely.\nYou want to remain deeply hands-on in coding, architecture, testing, and platform design.\nThis is a senior individual-contributor role. Approximately 99% of the position is focused on coding and design. Although you will provide technical leadership and mentor engineers, this is not a people-management position.\nThe Opportunity\nYou will own the architecture and engineering direction of a new network infrastructure automation platform. The platform will automate provisioning, configuration, validation, compliance, state collection, and safe change execution across Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Arista, and other network environments.\nA key focus of the role is moving beyond the current automation platform and creating new, modern capabilities using Python, Ansible, relational data models, APIs, background workers, testing frameworks, and AI-assisted engineering tools.\nYou will help build this platform from its early stages, define its architecture, establish its engineering standards, and write the production code that brings it to life.\nThis is not a traditional network architecture role, a pre-sales position, or a scripting-only automation role. We need an engineer who understands both sides of the problem: how production networks operate and how reliable software platforms are designed, developed, tested, deployed, and maintained.\nWhat You Will Deliver\nIn this role, you will:\nArchitect and build a new network infrastructure automation platform from the ground up.\nDevelop production-quality Python services, REST APIs, background workers, schedulers, device drivers, and data-access layers.\nExpand zero-touch provisioning across a large, multi-vendor network environment.\nTranslate network engineering standards and operational intent into testable, maintainable software.\nCreate reusable automation patterns for Cisco and Juniper platforms while accounting for vendor-specific behaviors.\nDesign relational data models using MariaDB or a comparable production database.\nBuild Ansible-based automation capabilities, including inventory, reusable content, execution controls, and integration with platform services.\nAutomate configuration generation, device onboarding, state collection, compliance verification, drift detection, firewall operations, and safe network change.\nEstablish testing, validation, approval, deployment, and rollback requirements for software-driven network changes.\nIntroduce responsible uses of AI-assisted development and agent-based workflows while maintaining human control over device-affecting actions.\nReduce technical debt and modernize existing Python components without compromising production stability.\nEstablish software engineering standards and mentor senior and junior engineers.\nCommunicate technical roadmaps, platform health, delivery risks, and architecture decisions to engineering and senior leadership.\nWhat You Will Do\nPlatform Architecture and Greenfield Development\nOwn the end-to-end architecture of the network automation platform.\nDefine service boundaries, APIs, background processing, device integrations, relational data models, operator workflows, and deployment patterns.\nHelp create the platform from an early-stage design or codebase through production implementation.\nDetermine when automation capabilities should be built within a shared platform and when a separate service or workflow is more appropriate.\nEstablish modular architecture patterns that support maintainability, testing, scalability, and future expansion.\nLead architecture and design reviews while remaining personally responsible for substantial portions of the implementation.\nDevelop a technical roadmap that balances greenfield platform creation, current operational needs, and responsible modernization of legacy components.\nNetwork Infrastructure Automation\nDesign and develop automation for Cisco and Juniper routers and switches, with additional support for Palo Alto, Arista, and other network platforms.\nBuild automation for Day-0, Day-1, and Day-2 network operations.\nDevelop zero-touch provisioning workflows for new devices and sites.\nAutomate network configuration generation, rendering, validation, comparison, deployment, and post-change verification.\nBuild device-state collection, polling, compliance, baseline-management, and configuration drift capabilities.\nDesign firewall and out-of-band network infrastructure automation where appropriate.\nTranslate network standards involving VLANs, LACP, BGP, OSPF, IP addressing, subnetting, and management connectivity into reusable software.\nAccount for vendor-specific configuration models, commit behavior, rollback mechanisms, APIs, and failure conditions.\nPython Software Engineering\nDevelop maintainable, production-quality Python rather than isolated or task-specific scripts.\nBuild REST APIs, services, background workers, schedulers, integration layers, device drivers, and reusable Python packages.\nApply software engineering practices involving modular design, interfaces, error handling, structured logging, dependency management, secure credential handling, and code review.\nRefactor legacy Python components using incremental and well-tested modernization strategies.\nDiagnose performance and reliability issues involving network round trips, concurrent device operations, database contention, worker capacity, and batch execution.\nDesign systems that support idempotency, bounded concurrency, appropriate retries, backpressure, and recovery from partial failures.\nEstablish coding standards and help other engineers improve the quality, readability, testing, and maintainability of their work.\nAnsible Platform Engineering\nDesign and develop Ansible-based network automation, including inventories, roles, collections, modules, plugins, and execution workflows.\nIntegrate Ansible with Python services, relational data, source-of-truth systems, approval processes, and operator-facing workflows.\nDefine standards for reusable automation instead of creating vendor-specific or site-specific playbooks that cannot scale.\nEstablish execution controls that support dry runs, configuration differences, approvals, staged deployment, post-change validation, and rollback.\nImprove the observability, auditability, and repeatability of Ansible-driven operations.\nSupport Ansible Automation Platform or comparable centralized orchestration capabilities where appropriate.\nData Architecture and MariaDB\nDesign and maintain relational data models for devices, interfaces, sites, inventory, network intent, observed state, automation jobs, approvals, and compliance exceptions.\nDevelop parameterized SQL queries and reliable data-access layers.\nCreate appropriate keys, constraints, indexes, and data-retention strategies.\nTune production queries and resolve performance or concurrency problems.\nPlan and execute safe database schema migrations.\nDefine which information is authoritative, which information is derived from device polling, and how conflicting or stale information should be handled.\nEnsure the platform publishes accurate, current, and traceable information.\nSource of Truth and State Reconciliation\nEstablish clear architectural boundaries for source-of-truth, IP address management, inventory, intended configuration, and observed device state.\nDesign workflows that reconcile intended and observed state without making unsafe assumptions.\nCreate mechanisms to detect stale inventory, configuration drift, incomplete changes, and inconsistent network state.\nEnsure all automated decisions are traceable to authoritative data and approved network standards.\nDefine freshness, coverage, accuracy, and reliability metrics for platform-published data.\nProduction Safety and Change Control\nDesign automation with the understanding that a software defect may misconfigure or isolate a production network device.\nIdentify automation designs that create unacceptable blast radius and replace them with safer, staged approaches.\nBuild change workflows that include:Pre-change validation\nDry-run execution\nConfiguration differences\nHuman or policy-based approval\nCanary or staged rollout\nConfirmed commit where supported\nPost-change verification\nStop conditions\nAudit trails\nRollback or forward-recovery procedures\n\nDefine how the system should respond to device unavailability, authentication failures, timeouts, partial commits, stale data, telemetry gaps, and inconsistent state.\nPartner with network engineering, security, and operations teams to certify new automated actions before production use.\nEnsure device-affecting automation is never promoted solely because the generated configuration or code appears plausible.\nQuality Engineering\nDefine the testing strategy for software that provisions or modifies production network infrastructure.\nDevelop unit, integration, contract, cross-functional, and automated regression tests.\nCreate realistic device fixtures using captured and sanitized configurations, mocked transports, and structured test data.\nUse virtual or containerized labs to validate Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Arista, and other vendor behaviors where appropriate.\nEstablish contract tests for reusable device drivers and vendor-abstraction layers.\nValidate configuration rendering, command execution, state parsing, failure recovery, and rollback behavior.\nHold AI-generated and human-written code, configurations, and templates to the same evidence standard.\nRequire lab validation, peer review, automated testing, and controlled promotion before high-risk changes reach production.\nAI-Assisted Engineering and Agent Systems\nUse AI-assisted development tools to accelerate appropriate engineering activities while independently validating their output.\nHelp define where AI assistance is beneficial, where it introduces unacceptable risk, and where human approval must remain mandatory.\nEvaluate AI-supported use cases such as:Network intent extraction\nCode and test generation\nConfiguration analysis\nChange summarization\nCompliance exception analysis\nAnomaly identification\nIncident triage\nOperational knowledge retrieval\n\nDesign validation mechanisms for non-deterministic output.\nPrevent autonomous AI or agent-based systems from making unverified production network changes.\nDefine test evidence, evaluation measures, approval requirements, and audit controls for AI-generated code or recommendations.\nEnsure AI-generated work is treated with the same rigor as a contribution from another engineer.\nDevOps, Reliability, and Operations\nDefine requirements for build and deployment pipelines, environment parity, worker capacity, scheduler design,...","description_format":"text","description_chars":23238,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United 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