Senior Network Automation Engineer

OpticoreIT Limited; City Of London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A specialist consultancy is seeking a Senior Network Automation Engineer to automate processes for a financial services client in Central London. This role involves designing network automation frameworks, building automation tools, and collaborating with engineers. The ideal candidate should have strong Python and Ansible skills, alongside knowledge of Linux networking and observability tools. This position requires being on-site 5 days a week for an initial 6-month contract.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in Python development for production-grade tools.
• Experience with Go for effective tooling.
• Strong knowledge in Ansible configuration and version control.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve the network automation framework.
• Build idempotent automation to operate data centre fabrics at scale.
• Collaborate with engineers to create automated workflows.

Skills

Advanced Python development

Go programming

Strong Ansible experience

Git proficiency

Observability fundamentals

Source of truth/CMDB systems

Linux networking

Workflow orchestration

Job description

Opticore IT are currently searching for a SeniorNetwork Automation Engineer to join one of our Financial Services clients to help automate all aspect of a growing, cutting edge datacentre and research platform. You will build tooling, pipeplines, and guardrails that turn network intent into safe, repeatable outcomes for high performance on premise datacentre.

Opticore IT is a specialist Network Engineer and Project Management consultancy offering a wide variety of opportunities to work within fast-paced,challenging environments across our client base spanning multiple sectors including Finance, Broadcast Media, Telecommunications and more.

This is an initial 6 month contract opportunity Inside IR35 with the prospect of extension. You will be required to be on site 5 days a week, based in Central London.

What you'll be doing:

• Design and evolve the network automation framework (source of truth, templating, validation, change control).
• Build idempotent automation to provision and operate data centre fabrics at scale.
• Integrate with vendor APIs and SDKs (e.g. Arista EOS, NetQ etc.)
• Capture network intent as code, ensuring peer reviews and quality gates.
• Instrument the network with telemetry, alerting, and SLOs to drive automated remediation.
• Adhere to NetDevOps practices and share knowledge across the team.
• Collaborate with network and platform engineers to translate designs into automated workflows.
• Deliver frequent, incremental improvements through safe, tested changes.
• Monitor vendor and industry developments and propose practical adoption paths.

What you'll bring:

• Advanced Python development for production-grade tools and services.
• Go (preferred) for performant tooling.
• Strong Ansible experience (roles, collections, YAML/JSON data models).
• Git proficiency including branching, pull requests, and semantic versioning.
• Observability fundamentals (Prometheus, Grafana, logging and tracing).
• Source of truth/CMDB systems (NetBox, Nautobot etc.).
• Linux networking (iptables, DHCP, DNS) and strong Bash scripting.
• Workflow orchestration (Temporal or equivalent).

Diversity:

At Opticore IT we embrace diversity and are committed to equal opportunities. We actively recruit for an inclusive and diverse workforce and as such, want to ensure we do everything we can to support your application.

We want you to feel empowered to let us know if you require any adjustments to be made with your application or interview process so please speak to our recruitment team.