Senior Network Automation Architect

BlackCube Labs; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

BlackCube Labs is seeking a Senior technologist to design, build, and govern network and infrastructure tooling platforms for enterprise environments in the Greater London area. You will shape automation strategy, reference architectures, and governing models while aligning with regulatory and risk requirements.

The role emphasizes self-service infrastructure with strong governance, comprehensive observability, and resilience.

Qualifications

• Architectural governance and security pattern knowledge.
• Experience with regulated environments, especially financial services.
• Ability to translate strategy into modular tooling and governance models.

Responsibilities

• Define tooling strategy and reference architectures aligned with platform engineering and DevOps principles.
• Design modular, API-driven tooling layers that decouple intent, policy, and execution across network and infrastructure domains.
• Establish standards for tool selection, integration, versioning, and lifecycle management.
• Align tooling strategy with regulatory, risk, and operational resilience requirements.
• Design and build automation using Python, Ansible, and declarative models to enable repeatable, low-risk change.
• Translate high-level design and policy into validated templates, pipelines, and reusable automation components.
• Implement guardrails including pre-change validation, compliance checks, drift detection, and automated rollback.
• Enable self-service infrastructure consumption models while maintaining strong governance and control.
• Design tooling and automation for Cisco ACI fabrics, tenants, policies, and multisite or multi-pod environments.
• Integrate Cisco ACI with IPAM, CMDB, CI/CD pipelines, and security platforms.
• Automate APIC operations, configuration lifecycle management, and consistency validation across environments.
• Use ACI policy models as part of a broader infrastructure abstraction strategy.
• Automate deployment and optimisation of BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, and hybrid WAN designs.
• Build tooling to support large-scale migration activities with minimal operational risk.
• Integrate SD-WAN, MPLS, and cloud connectivity into unified operational and observability platforms.
• Enable traffic engineering, QoS, and policy enforcement through code-driven workflows.
• Develop automation for fault detection, root cause analysis, and remediation.
• Integrate telemetry, logs, and metrics into observability platforms.
• Support SRE-style practices including error budgets, reliability metrics, and continuous feedback loops.
• Improve MTTR and operational consistency through standardised tooling and workflows.
• Embed security, segmentation, and compliance controls into automation pipelines.
• Ensure tooling supports audit trails, approval workflows, and evidence collection.
• Design tooling for highly regulated environments, particularly financial services.
• Collaborate with risk, security, and compliance teams to align tooling with enterprise policy.
• Define roadmaps and investment cases for infrastructure tooling platforms.
• Produce clear documentation covering architecture, automation standards, and operating models.
• Mentor engineers and establish best practices for automation-first networking.
• Communicate effectively with stakeholders across engineering, security, and management.

Skills

Architectural Rigor

Cross-Team Influence

Operational Excellence

Innovation & Forward Thinking

Tools

Python

Ansible

Infrastructure as Code

Declarative automation

REST APIs

CI/CD pipelines

Versioning

Drift detection

Compliance checks

Automated rollback

IPAM integration

CMDB integration

DevOps

Cloud networking

AWS

Azure

Data centre networking

SASE

Zero Trust

Identity-driven segmentation

Job description

BlackCube Labs is seeking a Senior technologist to design, build, and govern network and infrastructure tooling platforms for enterprise environments in the Greater London area. You will shape automation strategy, reference architectures, and governing models while aligning with regulatory and risk requirements.

The role emphasizes self-service infrastructure with strong governance, comprehensive observability, and resilience.