Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet. 

Senior Staff Software Engineer / Network Automation Architect

Build the Next Generation of Network Automation

We 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.

This opportunity is designed for an engineer with a distinctive combination of experience:

• You began your career working directly with routers, switches, routing protocols, network configurations, and production incidents.
• You transitioned from traditional network engineering into software engineering and Python development.
• You have designed and built network automation systems, not just individual scripts or playbooks.
• You understand how software decisions affect live network devices and know how to automate change safely.
• You want to remain deeply hands-on in coding, architecture, testing, and platform design.

This 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.

The Opportunity

You 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.

A 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.

You 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.

This 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.

What You Will Deliver

In this role, you will:

• Architect and build a new network infrastructure automation platform from the ground up.
• Develop production-quality Python services, REST APIs, background workers, schedulers, device drivers, and data-access layers.
• Expand zero-touch provisioning across a large, multi-vendor network environment.
• Translate network engineering standards and operational intent into testable, maintainable software.
• Create reusable automation patterns for Cisco and Juniper platforms while accounting for vendor-specific behaviors.
• Design relational data models using MariaDB or a comparable production database.
• Build Ansible-based automation capabilities, including inventory, reusable content, execution controls, and integration with platform services.
• Automate configuration generation, device onboarding, state collection, compliance verification, drift detection, firewall operations, and safe network change.
• Establish testing, validation, approval, deployment, and rollback requirements for software-driven network changes.
• Introduce responsible uses of AI-assisted development and agent-based workflows while maintaining human control over device-affecting actions.
• Reduce technical debt and modernize existing Python components without compromising production stability.
• Establish software engineering standards and mentor senior and junior engineers.
• Communicate technical roadmaps, platform health, delivery risks, and architecture decisions to engineering and senior leadership.

What You Will Do

Platform Architecture and Greenfield Development

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the network automation platform.
• Define service boundaries, APIs, background processing, device integrations, relational data models, operator workflows, and deployment patterns.
• Help create the platform from an early-stage design or codebase through production implementation.
• Determine when automation capabilities should be built within a shared platform and when a separate service or workflow is more appropriate.
• Establish modular architecture patterns that support maintainability, testing, scalability, and future expansion.
• Lead architecture and design reviews while remaining personally responsible for substantial portions of the implementation.
• Develop a technical roadmap that balances greenfield platform creation, current operational needs, and responsible modernization of legacy components.

Network Infrastructure Automation

• Design and develop automation for Cisco and Juniper routers and switches, with additional support for Palo Alto, Arista, and other network platforms.
• Build automation for Day-0, Day-1, and Day-2 network operations.
• Develop zero-touch provisioning workflows for new devices and sites.
• Automate network configuration generation, rendering, validation, comparison, deployment, and post-change verification.
• Build device-state collection, polling, compliance, baseline-management, and configuration drift capabilities.
• Design firewall and out-of-band network infrastructure automation where appropriate.
• Translate network standards involving VLANs, LACP, BGP, OSPF, IP addressing, subnetting, and management connectivity into reusable software.
• Account for vendor-specific configuration models, commit behavior, rollback mechanisms, APIs, and failure conditions.

Python Software Engineering

• Develop maintainable, production-quality Python rather than isolated or task-specific scripts.
• Build REST APIs, services, background workers, schedulers, integration layers, device drivers, and reusable Python packages.
• Apply software engineering practices involving modular design, interfaces, error handling, structured logging, dependency management, secure credential handling, and code review.
• Refactor legacy Python components using incremental and well-tested modernization strategies.
• Diagnose performance and reliability issues involving network round trips, concurrent device operations, database contention, worker capacity, and batch execution.
• Design systems that support idempotency, bounded concurrency, appropriate retries, backpressure, and recovery from partial failures.
• Establish coding standards and help other engineers improve the quality, readability, testing, and maintainability of their work.

Ansible Platform Engineering

• Design and develop Ansible-based network automation, including inventories, roles, collections, modules, plugins, and execution workflows.
• Integrate Ansible with Python services, relational data, source-of-truth systems, approval processes, and operator-facing workflows.
• Define standards for reusable automation instead of creating vendor-specific or site-specific playbooks that cannot scale.
• Establish execution controls that support dry runs, configuration differences, approvals, staged deployment, post-change validation, and rollback.
• Improve the observability, auditability, and repeatability of Ansible-driven operations.
• Support Ansible Automation Platform or comparable centralized orchestration capabilities where appropriate.

Data Architecture and MariaDB

• Design and maintain relational data models for devices, interfaces, sites, inventory, network intent, observed state, automation jobs, approvals, and compliance exceptions.
• Develop parameterized SQL queries and reliable data-access layers.
• Create appropriate keys, constraints, indexes, and data-retention strategies.
• Tune production queries and resolve performance or concurrency problems.
• Plan and execute safe database schema migrations.
• Define which information is authoritative, which information is derived from device polling, and how conflicting or stale information should be handled.
• Ensure the platform publishes accurate, current, and traceable information.

Source of Truth and State Reconciliation

• Establish clear architectural boundaries for source-of-truth, IP address management, inventory, intended configuration, and observed device state.
• Design workflows that reconcile intended and observed state without making unsafe assumptions.
• Create mechanisms to detect stale inventory, configuration drift, incomplete changes, and inconsistent network state.
• Ensure all automated decisions are traceable to authoritative data and approved network standards.
• Define freshness, coverage, accuracy, and reliability metrics for platform-published data.

Production Safety and Change Control

• Design automation with the understanding that a software defect may misconfigure or isolate a production network device.
• Identify automation designs that create unacceptable blast radius and replace them with safer, staged approaches.
• Build change workflows that include:
  • Pre-change validation
  • Dry-run execution
  • Configuration differences
  • Human or policy-based approval
  • Canary or staged rollout
  • Confirmed commit where supported
  • Post-change verification
  • Stop conditions
  • Audit trails
  • Rollback or forward-recovery procedures
• Define how the system should respond to device unavailability, authentication failures, timeouts, partial commits, stale data, telemetry gaps, and inconsistent state.
• Partner with network engineering, security, and operations teams to certify new automated actions before production use.
• Ensure device-affecting automation is never promoted solely because the generated configuration or code appears plausible.

Quality Engineering

• Define the testing strategy for software that provisions or modifies production network infrastructure.
• Develop unit, integration, contract, cross-functional, and automated regression tests.
• Create realistic device fixtures using captured and sanitized configurations, mocked transports, and structured test data.
• Use virtual or containerized labs to validate Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Arista, and other vendor behaviors where appropriate.
• Establish contract tests for reusable device drivers and vendor-abstraction layers.
• Validate configuration rendering, command execution, state parsing, failure recovery, and rollback behavior.
• Hold AI-generated and human-written code, configurations, and templates to the same evidence standard.
• Require lab validation, peer review, automated testing, and controlled promotion before high-risk changes reach production.

AI-Assisted Engineering and Agent Systems

• Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate appropriate engineering activities while independently validating their output.
• Help define where AI assistance is beneficial, where it introduces unacceptable risk, and where human approval must remain mandatory.
• Evaluate AI-supported use cases such as:
  • Network intent extraction
  • Code and test generation
  • Configuration analysis
  • Change summarization
  • Compliance exception analysis
  • Anomaly identification
  • Incident triage
  • Operational knowledge retrieval
• Design validation mechanisms for non-deterministic output.
• Prevent autonomous AI or agent-based systems from making unverified production network changes.
• Define test evidence, evaluation measures, approval requirements, and audit controls for AI-generated code or recommendations.
• Ensure AI-generated work is treated with the same rigor as a contribution from another engineer.

DevOps, Reliability, and Operations

• Define requirements for build and deployment pipelines, environment parity, worker capacity, scheduler design, database topology, and credential management.
• Maintain disciplined promotion across development, lab, staging, and production environments.
• Ensure releases include application code, database migrations, configuration state, validation evidence, monitoring, and rollback readiness.
• Establish observability for application performance, device operations, job execution, database health, and automation outcomes.
• Diagnose incidents that span both software and network conditions.
• Define operational service levels for the automation platform.
• Report platform health using measures such as:
  • Device and site coverage
  • Polling and inventory freshness
  • Configuration-rendering success
  • Change and verification success
  • Job duration and failure rates
  • Open drift and compliance exceptions
  • Rollback frequency
  • Platform availability and reliability

Technical Leadership and Mentorship

• Provide technical leadership without relying on formal reporting authority.
• Establish architecture, coding, testing, deployment, and documentation standards.
• Mentor junior engineers in software engineering and network automation fundamentals.
• Mentor senior engineers through architecture reviews, design feedback, and complex problem solving.
• Facilitate productive decisions between software engineering, network engineering, security, and operations teams.
• Estimate work accurately, including engineering effort, lab validation, operational certification, and change-approval time.
• Communicate technical roadmaps and architecture decisions clearly to engineering teams and senior leadership.
• Explain complex risks and tradeoffs in language appropriate for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

• Eight or more years of relevant engineering experience, including substantial experience in both network engineering and software development.
• A career foundation involving hands-on routing, switching, network configuration, troubleshooting, and production network operations.
• Demonstrated progression from traditional network engineering into Python-based software engineering or network automation.
• Strong production Python development experience, including services, APIs, background processing, automated testing, packaging, logging, and dependency management.
• Demonstrated experience helping create a network automation platform, infrastructure automation system, or significant greenfield automation capability.
• Hands-on experience with both Cisco and Juniper network environments.
• Experience with Cisco IOS-XE or NX-OS and Juniper Junos.
• Deep understanding of L2 and L3 networking, including VLANs, LACP, BGP, OSPF, IP addressing, subnetting, and out-of-band management.
• Experience automating production network devices through NETCONF, vendor APIs, structured CLI, SSH, or comparable programmatic interfaces.
• Experience with Ansible for network automation, including more than basic playbook execution.
• Experience with at least one additional network automation framework or device library, such as Nornir, NAPALM, Netmiko, PyEZ, Scrapli, pyATS, or an equivalent technology.
• SQL and relational data-modeling experience using MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or a comparable production database.
• Experience designing, writing, and tuning queries against production schemas.
• Demonstrated judgment involving live network change, including dry runs, configuration differences, staged rollout, verification, stop conditions, and rollback.
• Experience with Git-based development, peer review, automated testing, and CI/CD.
• Experience owning architecture for a major software or automation platform.
• Experience leading design reviews, setting technical standards, mentoring engineers, and communicating technical roadmaps.
• Ability to use AI-assisted development tools responsibly and independently validate generated code, tests, configurations, or recommendations.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Network Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building a new network automation platform from an early-stage design, prototype, or blank repository.
• Enterprise or data center zero-touch provisioning experience.
• Configuration compliance, baseline-management, and drift-detection experience.
• Experience integrating with NetBox, Nautobot, IPAM, CMDB, inventory, or another network source-of-truth platform.
• Advanced Ansible experience, including custom modules, collections, execution environments, event-driven automation, or Ansible Automation Platform.
• Production MariaDB experience.
• Palo Alto PAN-OS or Arista EOS automation experience.
• Firewall automation experience.
• Experience with SNMP, syslog, streaming telemetry, or gNMI.
• Experience with Docker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or comparable build and deployment tooling.
• Experience using containerlab, vJunos, EVE-NG, Cisco Modeling Labs, or another virtual network lab.
• Data center, colocation, service-provider, or large enterprise network experience.
• Experience automating out-of-band console or network-management infrastructure.
• Experience designing AI-supported operational tools, agent systems, or machine-learning capabilities with measurable evaluation and human-approval controls.
• Public technical contributions such as open-source code, conference presentations, technical articles, standards participation, mentoring, or community leadership.
• Relevant certifications such as JNCIP, JNCIE, CCNP, CCIE, Cisco DevNet, PCNSE, or equivalent practical expertise.

Working Expectations

• This is a highly hands-on individual-contributor position.
• Approximately 99% of the role is focused on coding, architecture, platform design, testing, and technical delivery.
• No future people-management responsibility is currently defined.
• The role is not currently part of a formal on-call rotation.
• Automated production changes outside normal business hours are uncommon.
• The successful candidate must live in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and meet the position’s established workplace expectations.

What Success Looks Like

First 90 Days

• Understand the current automation platform, network environment, source systems, and operational workflows.
• Build strong working relationships with network engineering, software engineering, security, and operations teams.
• Assess the current Python architecture, Ansible content, MariaDB schemas, deployment processes, testing practices, and major sources of technical debt.
• Produce an initial architecture and phased roadmap for the next-generation automation platform.
• Deliver an early technical capability, prototype, or modernization milestone that demonstrates the target architecture.

First Six Months

• Establish platform architecture, coding, testing, and change-safety standards.
• Deliver initial production capabilities for Cisco and Juniper automation.
• Improve zero-touch provisioning, configuration rendering, validation, or state reconciliation.
• Introduce repeatable lab and automated testing for high-risk device operations.
• Demonstrate measurable improvements in maintainability, reliability, delivery speed, or network-change safety.
• Establish responsible AI-assisted engineering and code-validation practices.

First Year

• Deliver major components of the new network automation platform.
• Expand safe, repeatable automation across network devices, sites, and vendors.
• Reduce technical debt and reliance on fragile or manual workflows.
• Improve automation coverage, data freshness, compliance visibility, change success, and rollback readiness.
• Establish a sustainable engineering model that enables senior and junior team members to contribute safely and effectively.

Why Join Us?

This role offers the opportunity to combine deep network engineering expertise with modern software development. You will not be limited to maintaining scripts or administering an existing tool. You will help define and build the platform that automates a large, complex, multi-vendor production network.

If you have configured and troubleshot routers and switches, transitioned into serious Python development, and helped create production automation systems from the ground up, this role offers the scope and technical ownership to make a significant impact.