Network Engineer

TekWissen • Ashburn, VA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Accenture is hiring a Network Engineer for a 12-month temporary, onsite assignment in Ashburn, Virginia. The role supports networks in hardware validation labs worldwide, including datacenter fabrics, precision timing, optical infrastructure, provisioning systems, and lab operations. These systems support accelerator teams as they validate platforms from initial bring-up through production handoff.

The engineer will design and operate L2/L3 lab fabrics, provide precision timing services, automate intent-based provisioning, support optical and test infrastructure, improve reliability, and reduce costs through decommissioning. The role works closely with platform and hardware bring-up teams and lab customers, including providing consultative support beyond the plan of record.

The team uses internal platforms with industry analogues, including Git-backed hierarchical configuration management, Jinja templates, declarative intent automation, graph-modeled network state, NetBox-style inventory, orchestration and topology visualization, and daily revision-control reviews. Success in the first half includes migrating a rack boundary to routed operation, delivering a provisioning flow driven by intent without manual CLI work, extending timing service to a cluster with monitoring, and tracking and categorizing unplanned support requests.

Requirements

• Deep L2/L3 networking experience, including VLANs, loop prevention, LAG, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, SLAAC, router advertisements, DHCP relay/helpers, and end-to-end PXE boot flows.
• BGP experience, including eBGP peering design, prefix policy, uplink preference tuning, and route origination per rack or site.
• Datacenter fabric experience, including leaf/spine design, EVPN/VXLAN overlays, and migration from L2-bridged to L3-routed boundaries.
• IPv6 operations experience, including RA Guard, address locking, DHCPv6 relay, MAC-stable allocation behavior, client identifier considerations, and /64-per-rack planning.
• PTP (IEEE 1588) design and troubleshooting experience, including grandmaster placement, boundary and transparent clocks, and sync-quality monitoring against microsecond budgets.
• AI/HPC fabric knowledge, including PFC and lossless Ethernet tuning, link training, SerDes and optics basics, and awareness of skew and tail latency effects on collective communication.
• Optical and physical plant knowledge, including fiber types and connectors, optical circuit switching concepts, commercial traffic generators, cable validation, and fiber characterization using hardware timestamps.
• Access-security experience with port ACLs, 802.1X/MAB, RADIUS, quarantine and remediation VLANs, and device onboarding and registration.
• Deep experience with at least one datacenter network operating system: Arista, Cisco, Juniper, or SONiC; ability to learn other platforms and operate through APIs with rollback.
• Packet-level debugging, hardware timestamp analysis, method-of-procedure authorship, maintenance-window execution, and rollback planning.
• Python for network automation, including device APIs, text templating, input validation, and operator CLI tooling.
• Jinja2 template design for reuse across sites and roles, safe defaults, and per-port rendering from inventory.
• Distributed revision-control fluency, including branching, review, landing, reverting, configuration review practices, and CI gates on generated configuration.
• Declarative intent and source-of-truth approach in which inventory and intent render device configuration and generated configuration is never hand-edited.
• Linux networking knowledge, including interfaces, routing tables, namespaces, packet-capture tooling, service management, and cookbook-style configuration management such as Chef.
• Data hygiene practices, including accurate inventory for roles, port maps, and serial-to-port bindings, as well as drift detection and reconciliation loops.
• Lab or datacenter operations experience, including on-call rotations, incident response, break/fix prioritization, vendor RMAs, and multi-site coordination.
• Change-management discipline, including method-of-procedure authorship and peer review, blast-radius control, and pilot-then-scale approaches.
• Cost awareness involving circuit inventories, carrier coordination for service turn-down, recurring-spend tracking, and chargeback confirmation.
• Cross-functional delivery with platform teams, hardware bring-up teams, and lab customers.

Nice To Haves

• AI/HPC cluster networking experience, including scale-up versus scale-out fabric design, RDMA-capable fabrics, and sensitivity of collective communications to timing.
• Experience operating a large fiber plant or optical switching infrastructure.
• Experience with IPv6-first or IPv6-only environments at scale.
• Observability experience with time-series metrics, topology visualization, and low-noise alert design.
• Experience evaluating vendors, switch selection criteria, and optics compatibility testing.

Responsibilities

• Design and support L2/L3 lab network fabrics, including VLANs, routing, datacenter fabric overlays, and rack migrations from bridged to routed boundaries.
• Design and operate BGP peering, prefix policies, uplink preferences, and route origination toward border and aggregation layers.
• Operate IPv6 networks, including first-hop security, DHCPv6 relay, address allocation, and per-rack /64 planning.
• Design, troubleshoot, and monitor PTP precision timing services, including grandmaster placement and boundary or transparent clock concepts.
• Support AI/HPC network fabrics, lossless Ethernet tuning, high-speed links, optics, and optical and physical infrastructure.
• Operate access-security flows, including port ACLs, 802.1X/MAB, RADIUS, quarantine and remediation VLANs, and device onboarding.
• Automate network configuration and operations using Python, device APIs, Jinja2 templates, and operator CLI tooling.
• Maintain declarative intent and source-of-truth workflows in which inventory and intent render device configuration and generated configuration is not hand-edited.
• Use distributed revision control, configuration review, CI gates, generated-configuration diff review, and rollback practices.
• Support Linux networking, configuration management, inventory accuracy, drift detection, and reconciliation loops.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response; prioritize break/fix work, manage vendor RMAs, and coordinate across sites.
• Author and peer-review methods of procedure, control change blast radius, and use pilot deployments before scaling changes.
• Track circuit inventories and recurring spend, coordinate carrier turn-downs, and obtain chargeback confirmation.
• Coordinate delivery with platform teams, hardware bring-up teams, and lab customers.
• Track and categorize unplanned support requests.
• Extend timing services to clusters with monitoring and deliver rack-boundary migrations and intent-based provisioning flows.

What This Job Offers

• Education Level: No Education Listed