Senior Software Engineer - Network Automation

Equinix•Dallas, TX

1d•$136,000 - $204,000•Onsite

About The Position

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet. A place where tech thinkers and future builders turn bold ideas into breakthrough experiences, we welcome your unique perspective. Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers—because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you—because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work. Analyzes business and network requirements to determine feasibility of design within time, cost, and operational-risk constraints. Designs, builds, and operates the software that automates a multi-vendor production network — configuration generation, device state collection, compliance verification, and change execution. Translates network engineering intent into tested, reviewable code and is accountable for changes that reach live network devices. Works with AI-assisted development tooling as a normal part of the engineering workflow and is accountable for the correctness of what it produces.

Requirements

8+ years combined software engineering and network engineering/automation experience, with production ownership on both sides
Bachelor's in Computer Science or Computer Engineering
Strong Python — building and maintaining services, not just scripts: web framework, background task execution, testing, packaging, and dependency management
Hands-on multi-vendor network device automation covering at least two of Juniper Junos, Cisco IOS-XE/NX-OS, Arista EOS, or Palo Alto PAN-OS, using NETCONF, vendor APIs, or structured CLI
Practical command of at least one automation framework or device library (Ansible, NAPALM, Netmiko, Nornir, PyEZ, or equivalent) and template-driven configuration generation
Working networking knowledge at the level required to review a generated configuration and know it is wrong — L2/L3 switching and routing, VLANs, LACP, BGP/OSPF, addressing and subnetting, and device management/OOB access
SQL and relational data modeling; comfortable writing and tuning queries against a production schema
Git-based workflow, code review, and CI/CD
Production judgment on device-touching change — dry run and diff before write, staged rollout, and a rollback plan
Working proficiency with AI-assisted development tooling, and the judgment to review, correct, and reject its output — the ability to tell a correct generated configuration from a plausible one is a requirement of the role

Nice To Haves

configuration compliance, drift detection, or baseline configuration programs at fleet scale
operating a network source of truth or IPAM and reconciling it against polled device state
SNMP, syslog, or streaming telemetry collection pipelines at scale
Ansible at scale (inventory design, custom modules, execution environments) or Ansible Automation Platform
Docker, Jenkins or equivalent pipeline tooling, Linux service operation (systemd), and clustered database or message-broker operation
virtual labs and device simulation for pre-production validation (containerlab, vJunos, EVE-NG or similar)
data center or colocation network experience; exposure to firewall and out-of-band console infrastructure
experience integrating AI or machine learning into operational tooling, including prompt design, evaluation, and guardrails for non-deterministic output
certifications such as JNCIP/JNCIE, CCNP/CCIE, PCNSE, or equivalent

Responsibilities

Reviews, analyzes and gives feedback on requirements/functional designs, including the network intent behind them — topology, addressing, standards, and vendor constraints
Attends and engages in requirement definition meetings with network engineering, operations, and data center teams; converts verbal network standards into explicit, testable specifications
Identifies where a requested automation would create unacceptable blast radius and proposes a safer decomposition
Participates and leads architectural review process for automation services, device drivers, and data models
Owns the design of the device data model and source-of-truth boundaries — what is authoritative, what is derived from polling, and how the two reconcile
Sets the pattern for vendor abstraction so a new platform is an added driver, not a fork of the pipeline
Designs for larger enhancements, projects and cross system/functional enhancements spanning the configuration renderer, collection/polling layer, verification engine, and operator-facing UI
Designs template and rendering strategy so a single change to a standard propagates predictably across sites, roles, and vendors
Designs the change-execution path: dry run, diff, approval, staged rollout, confirmed commit, and rollback
Conducts design reviews, provides technical leadership
Develops and maintains Python code for larger enhancements, projects and integrations — REST APIs, background schedulers and workers, device drivers, and data-access layers against a relational database
Builds and maintains multi-vendor device interaction over NETCONF, SSH/CLI, vendor APIs, and SNMP (Juniper, Cisco, Arista, Palo Alto, plus out-of-band console infrastructure)
Implements configuration rendering, config diffing, drift detection, and compliance verification against defined standards
Fixes defects and participates and conducts peer code review
Follows and proposes design and coding standards and processes — parameterized queries, structured logging, no credentials in code
Uses AI-assisted development tooling effectively and reviews its output with the same rigor as any peer contribution; AI-generated code, configuration, or templates are never merged or pushed to a device on the strength of plausibility alone
Establishes team practice for where AI assistance is appropriate and where it is not, and defines the review and test evidence required before generated work reaches production
Provides technical leadership
Conducts code performance analysis, tuning and review — query and round-trip cost, poll concurrency, database contention under a clustered write path, and batch sizing across thousands of devices
Develops unit and cross functional tests, develops test strategies, executes test cases, logs issues, manages issues, recommends testing frameworks, records and runs automated test scripts, and designs automated test scripts
Defines test strategy for code whose failure mode is a misconfigured production network device
Builds and maintains device-level test fixtures — captured configurations, mocked transports, and virtual or containerized lab devices — so device-touching logic is tested without touching production
Ensures generated code and configuration is held to the same test evidence as hand-written work — verified against fixtures and lab devices, not accepted because it looks correct
Defines roadmap of automation tools and its value to software engineering and network operations practices
Drives infrastructure requirements — build and deploy pipelines, worker and scheduler capacity, database topology, credential storage, and environment parity across dev, staging, and production
Reviews release planning and deployment lists
Ensures quality and completeness of deployments, including database migrations and configuration state, not just application code
Maintains promotion discipline across the dev to staging to production branch path
Defines roadmap of production change control and its value to software engineering practices, as it applies to automated network changes — authorization, audit trail, maintenance windows, and provable rollback
Drives certification processes working with cross-domain teams (network engineering, security, data center operations) before a new automated action is permitted against production devices
Takes accountability of the Operational SLAs of the platform and the currency of the data it publishes
Responsible for the debugging of L2 & L3 incidents/problems spanning both application faults and the network conditions that trigger them — unreachable devices, partial or timed-out commits, authentication failures, telemetry gaps, and stale inventory
Responsible for status reporting to engineering and network operations stakeholders
Defines and drives release management planning
Reports platform health in operational terms — device and site coverage, poll freshness, render and verification success rate, and open compliance exceptions
Provides level of effort (LOE), including the lab validation and change-approval time that device-touching work requires
Manages assigned development tasks to schedule/plan, provides leadership and planning for completing development for large enhancements and projects
Sequences work so device-affecting changes land behind a verification gate rather than in front of one
Evaluates emerging network automation and telemetry approaches — streaming telemetry/gNMI, model-driven configuration, and intent verification — and recommends adoption where they reduce operational risk or manual effort
Evaluates applied AI and machine learning for network operations — configuration and change summarization, anomaly and incident triage, intent extraction from written standards — and recommends adoption only where the output can be validated and a human remains in the loop for any device-affecting action