Senior Lead Engineer, Network Automation & Orchestration

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 24 hours with zero external partner impact.

What You Will Own

1. Build and execute a multi-year network automation and orchestration roadmap aligned to reliability speed and partner continuity goals.
2. Establish the engineering model for infrastructure-as-code and intent-based networking at scale.
3. Design and govern automation platforms APIs data models and control loops for network operations.
4. Lead architecture and implementation of event-driven workflows for day-0/day-1/day-2 network changes and rapid upgrade delivery.
5. Drive migration from manual and device-centric operations to declarative policy-based lifecycle management.
6. Define golden patterns reusable modules and quality gates for network automation pipelines.
7. Partner with SRE Security Platform Product and Operations leaders to embed compliance resiliency and non-disruptive partner experiences by design.
8. Mentor Lead and Senior engineers set technical bar and create a high-performance engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities

1. Author technical strategy reference architectures and implementation standards for network automation and orchestrated upgrade delivery.
2. Lead engineering delivery for orchestration systems integrating routers switches firewalls cloud networking and observability stacks.
3. Define CI/CD and test automation practices for network code including simulation canarying phased rollout automatic rollback and partner-impact validation.
4. Champion closed-loop remediation and autonomous operations using telemetry and policy engines.
5. Build and enforce release orchestration that enables approved software upgrades to production within 24 hours.
6. Ensure upgrade execution is transparent and seamless to external partners with no service degradation or interruption.
7. Improve MTTR change success rate deployment velocity and operational consistency through automation.
8. Establish operational excellence metrics and executive-level reporting for automation program impact and upgrade SLA adherence.
9. Influence vendor and open-source ecosystem decisions based on scalability interoperability reliability and upgrade safety.

Required Qualifications

1. 10 years in infrastructure engineering with at least 5 years leading infrastructure or network automation at enterprise or service-provider scale.
2. Proven leadership delivering production-grade network automation/orchestration platforms across multi-vendor environments.
3. Demonstrated success designing zero-downtime or near-zero-downtime upgrade strategies for networked platforms serving external partners.
4. Strong software engineering capability in Python or Go and API-first system design.
5. Expertise with infrastructure-as-code and automation frameworks (for example: Ansible Terraform Nornir NetBox GitOps workflows).
6. Experience building robust automation quality practices: versioning testing linting peer review release governance.
7. Track record influencing senior stakeholders and leading cross-functional execution in global organizations.

Preferred Qualifications

1. Experience with intent-based networking source-of-truth systems and model-driven telemetry.
2. Familiarity with gNMI/NETCONF/RESTCONF or similar message buses and event-driven architecture patterns.
3. Experience in hybrid cloud network automation and secure connectivity design and tools such as Nautobot.
4. Deep knowledge of network protocols and architectures (BGP OSPF/IS-IS EVPN/VXLAN MPLS QoS ACL/policy models).
5. Prior people leadership for geographically distributed teams.
6. English/Spanish bilingual collaboration capability is a plus.

Leadership Expectations

1. Sets engineering vision and aligns teams around measurable business reliability and partner-experience outcomes.
2. Balances strategic architecture with practical incremental delivery.
3. Raises quality standards and accountability across architecture coding release and operations.
4. Creates clarity in ambiguity and drives decisions with data and technical rigor.