Senior Network Automation Engineer

Equinix•Dallas, TX

5d•$136,000 - $204,000

About The Position

Equinix is seeking a highly experienced and technically accomplished Senior Staff Software Engineer to join the Network Platform Engineering (NPE) team. This is a senior individual contributor role at the intersection of software engineering and network infrastructure, designed for engineers who thrive on building platforms that other engineers depend on at scale. In this role, you will be a hands-on contributor responsible for designing, building, and scaling our Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform, while also advancing our existing Network Automation platform with new capabilities. You will partner closely with cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Operations, and Observability teams to deliver solutions that accelerate the velocity and reliability of network certification, testing, and deployment pipelines. This is a high-impact, high-visibility position that requires strong engineering judgment, a bias for action, and the ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams and business units.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in Network Engineering and Automation.
Bachelor’s in Electrical engineering, Electronics, Computer Engineering or Related Field preferred.
Excellent understanding of OSI layers, hands-on experience with routing and switching in multi-vendor, large-scale environments.
Deep proficiency in service provider and data center networking protocols: Routing: BGP (iBGP/eBGP, route policies, communities, route reflectors), OSPF, IS-IS; MPLS: LDP, RSVP-TE, Segment Routing (SR-MPLS, SRv6); Overlay/Underlay: VXLAN, EVPN, L3VPN, L2VPN; Network virtualization: CNF, VNF, SR-IOV, DPDK.
Strong programming proficiency in Python (required) including test frameworks (pytest), async programming, and familiarity with Go and Elixir is preferred.
Solid understanding of REST API design, GraphQL, gRPC, and OpenConfig/YANG-based network management interfaces (NETCONF, RESTCONF, gNMI).
Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (K8s), Helm, ArgoCD, and cloud-native application patterns.
Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tooling: Terraform, Ansible etc. for environment provisioning and configuration management.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and DevOps best practices including trunk-based development and automated testing gates.
Hands-on experience with AWS Bedrock, including networking services (VPC, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect etc.).
Deep familiarity with observability stacks: Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, OTEL.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with Go and Elixir is preferred.
Familiarity with AI Chatbot interface for EAAS.
Experience with AI-assisted development practices, including prompt engineering and structured code review of AI-generated output.
Experience adopting AI/ML-powered developer tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude code, code generation assistants, AI-driven static analysis).

Responsibilities

Design and develop comprehensive automation frameworks to validate and certify vendor agnostic Network Operating Systems (NOS), including feature validation, traffic profiling, regression testing, and real-world customer use case simulation.
Lead the design and implementation of the Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform, driving the strategic migration from physical lab infrastructure to scalable, containerized, and software-defined test environments leveraging Containerized Network Functions (CNF).
Define and implement a roadmap for test environment provisioning, enabling on-demand, self-service access to virtualized network topologies for development and QA teams.
Gather, refine, and translate complex testing requirements from multiple stakeholders into well-scoped engineering tasks and automated test case implementations.
Build and maintain platform tooling and automation frameworks using Python, Go, and Elixir, with a focus on code quality, maintainability, and reusability across teams.
Managing and implementing Kubernetes(K8) clusters, debugging at scale and deployment using ArgoCD.
Design and development of cloud-native applications.
Define and enforce monitoring standards, create operational dashboards, implement intelligent alerting strategies, and establish SLI/SLO frameworks aligned to platform reliability goals.
Contribute to front-end and back-end development of internal Web applications that provide visibility and control over the EaaS and automation platform, collaborating with UX and product partners as needed.
Contribute in code reviews and implement CI/CD pipelines.
Contribute to the architecture and design of next-generation network infrastructure solutions spanning Layers 1–3, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with long-term platform strategy.
Develop comprehensive test plans and certification strategies; lead hands-on technical deep-dives to verify that architectural designs, new NOS features, and customer use cases perform as expected in lab and production-equivalent environments.
Act as a subject matter expert for service provider networking protocols including BGP (iBGP/eBGP, policy, route reflectors), MPLS (LDP, RSVP, segment routing), VXLAN, EVPN, ISIS, and OSPF in multi-vendor environments.
Support vendor evaluations and feature gap analyses, provide technical guidance on network hardware and NOS selection aligned to architectural requirements.
Design & Develop MCP Server and implement AI Chatbot interface for EAAS.
Understand current Agentic workflows & contribute to improving and designing more workflows.
Execute AI-assisted development practices within the team, including prompt engineering, structured code review of AI-generated output.
Adopt AI/ML-powered developer tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude code, code generation assistants, AI-driven static analysis) to measurably improve team productivity and code quality.
Establish guardrails and review processes to ensure AI-generated code meets the same standards for correctness, security, and maintainability as hand-authored code.