Senior Network Engineer

About The Role

The Senior Network Automation Engineer role within the GÉANT Operations department involves contributing to the team responsible for defining the medium to long-term direction of GÉANT's pan-European research and education E-Infrastructure, specifically in the areas of network automation and management. As a key contributor to the long-term network automation strategy, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that enhance operational efficiency and future network capabilities. You will provide technical leadership, define best practices, and act as a subject matter expert in network automation. Leveraging tools such as Ansible, Python, and Bash, you will drive the implementation of automation systems while staying ahead of industry trends to recommend and adopt emerging technologies. Additionally, the role involves presenting technical designs and evaluations, attending global research and education (R&E) conferences, and influencing best practices within GÉANT and the wider community. Through these contributions, you will play a vital role in shaping the future of network management and automation at GÉANT.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of network automation solutions ensuring these solutions meet the operational requirements while being scalable and maintainable for future needs.
• Work in a cross-functional team to define and execute the long-term network automation strategy.
• Contribute to the architectural design of network automation systems, ensuring they are aligned with broader business goals and evolving technologies.
• Stay on top of industry trends and emerging technologies to recommend innovative solutions that drive future network capabilities.
• Act as a subject matter expert in network automation, providing technical leadership to the team and influencing best practices.
• Collaborate with network engineers, systems administrators, DevOps, and other stakeholders to align automation initiatives with operational needs.
• Write and present high-level designs, technical evaluations, and analysis of new and experimental network tools and services.
• Attend and present at R&E technical conferences and industry events, such as TNC, APAN, Global Summit, and CTO workshops.
• In addition to the above you will carry out such other duties as may reasonably be required.

About You

• Expertise in network automation, with proven experience designing, implementing, and scaling network automation solutions.
• Proficiency with Ansible, Python, and Bash for automating network tasks, configuration management, and orchestration.
• Familiarity with containers (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and integrating network automation into agile DevOps workflows.
• Understanding of service provider network architectures, including carrier-grade routing and switching, and MPLS.
• Experience with Git and version control in managing automation code.

About Us

Why work for GÉANT?

GÉANT is at the heart of research and education networking, we offer talented people the opportunity to be part of something meaningful and worthwhile. With 150 employees based in Amsterdam and Cambridge, together we deliver an information ecosystem of infrastructure and services to advance research, education, and innovation on a global scale. Thanks to our terabit network, 50 million researchers, scientists, academics and students can share record volumes of data unconstrained by location, solving some of humankind’s biggest challenges. Work at GÉANT and you’ll be supporting critical research into sustainable energy, deep space, high-energy physics, earth observation, environmental disasters, medicine and much more!

Benefits of working for GÉANT

You’ll receive excellent benefits at GÉANT – we offer a generous holiday allowance and a 5% end of year bonus/allowance as standard. The other benefits you receive will depend on the country you are employed in, but you can rest assured that these will include an appropriate pension scheme and medical insurance.

Working Arrangements

We have adopted a flexible-hybrid model which means that employees will work flexibly between a remote and office environment. Weekly visits to the office are required for most employees to support our values and collaborative culture and enable our teams to deliver great work. For this role we anticipate that you may be required in the office for around 2 days per week.