Senior Software Engineer - Network Automation

Equinix, Inc.; Dallas (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Equinix, the world’s digital infrastructure company, seeks a senior software engineer to analyze business and network requirements and translate them into scalable automation for a multi-vendor production network.

You will design data models, drive architecture reviews, develop Python-based services and device drivers, and ensure compliant, testable configurations across Juniper, Cisco, Arista, and Palo Alto gear.

Qualifications

• 8+ years combined software and network automation experience.
• Bachelor's in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.
• Strong Python — building services, not just scripts: web framework, background tasks, testing, packaging.
• Hands-on multi-vendor network automation covering Juniper, Cisco, Arista, Palo Alto, using NETCONF, vendor APIs, or structured CLI.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tooling and rigorous code review.
• Preferred: configuration compliance, drift detection, or fleet-scale tooling.

Responsibilities

• Reviews and translates requirements into explicit, testable specs.
• Owns the device data model and vendor abstraction boundaries.
• Designs architecture for automation services, device drivers, and data models.
• Develops and maintains Python code for REST APIs, schedulers, and drivers.
• Implements configuration rendering, diffing, drift detection, and compliance verification.
• Drives QA strategy, tests, and fixtures; ensures production quality.

Skills

Python

Networking

SQL

Git

CI/CD

NETCONF

Ansible

NAPALM

Nornir

Device automation

AI-assisted tooling

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science or Computer Engineering

Tools

Juniper Junos

Cisco IOS-XE/NX-OS

Arista EOS

Palo Alto PAN-OS

NETCONF

vendor APIs

Structured CLI

Ansible

NAPALM

Netmiko

Nornir

PyEZ

Job description

Who are we?

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.

Job Summary

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.

Responsibilities

Requirements Analysis

• 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

Software/Application Architecture

• 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

Software Design

• 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

Development/Coding

• 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

Application QA

• 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

DevOps

• 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

Software Reliability & Support Engineering

• 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

Reporting

• 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

Technical Project Management

• 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

R&D

• 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

Qualifications

• 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 managementHands-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
• Preferred: configuration compliance, drift detection, or baseline configuration programs at fleet scale
• Preferred: operating a network source of truth or IPAM and reconciling it against polled device state
• Preferred: SNMP, syslog, or streaming telemetry collection pipelines at scale