Senior Network Automation Engineer

Senior Network Automation Engineer in England

England Full-Time No home office possible

Opticore IT is currently searching for a Senior Network Automation Engineer to join one of our Financial Services clients. The role involves building tooling, pipelines, and guardrails that transform network intent into safe, repeatable outcomes for high‑performance on‑prem datacentres.

Overview

This is an initial 6‑month contract inside IR35, with the prospect of extension. The position requires on‑site presence five days a week, based in Central London.

Responsibilities

Design and evolve the network automation framework (source of truth, templating, validation, change control).
Build idempotent automation to provision and operate data centre fabrics at scale.
Integrate with vendor APIs and SDKs (e.g. Arista EOS, NetQ).
Capture network intent as code, ensuring peer reviews and quality gates.
Instrument the network with telemetry, alerting, and SLOs to drive automated remediation.
Adhere to NetDevOps practices and share knowledge across the team.
Collaborate with network and platform engineers to translate designs into automated workflows.
Deliver frequent, incremental improvements through safe, tested changes.
Monitor vendor and industry developments and propose practical adoption paths.

Qualifications

Advanced Python development for production‑grade tools and services.
Go (preferred) for performant tooling.
Strong Ansible experience (roles, collections, YAML/JSON data models).
Git proficiency including branching, pull requests, and semantic versioning.
Observability fundamentals (Prometheus, Grafana, logging and tracing).
Source of truth/CMDB systems (NetBox, Nautobot).
Linux networking (iptables, DHCP, DNS) and strong Bash scripting.
Workflow orchestration (Temporal or equivalent).

Diversity & Inclusion

At Opticore IT we embrace diversity and are committed to equal opportunities. We actively recruit for an inclusive and diverse workforce and will support you in any adjustments needed during the application or interview process.