Principal Network Automation Architect

The Principal Network Automation Architect is a hands-on technical leadership role accountable for the architecture, engineering, and operation of the API-driven network automation platform beneath Flexential’s customer self-service portal.

This platform enables customers to order and provision network services on demand. It exposes service catalog, feasibility, ordering, provisioning, and lifecycle APIs for L3

VPN, Data Center Interconnect (DCI), IP Transit, Layer 2 transport, and cloud on-ramp connectivity, and executes those orders across Flexential’s nationwide multi-service backbone.

Scope and scale:

• 40+ points of presence
• A multi-vendor footprint spanning Arista, Cisco, and Fortinet routing, switching, and firewall platforms
• Platform consumers across the customer self-service portal, Network Operations, Service Delivery, Security Engineering, and Product Management

This is a senior individual contributor role reporting to the Vice President, Network Services.

The Principal Architect owns the technical vision, architectural standards, and multi-year roadmap for a custom, Python-based network-as-code platform. This platform is original software developed in-house, rather than a packaged or open-source product that is deployed and configured. The role holds design authority across the network automation function, is positioned to assume formal team leadership as the function scales and remains directly accountable for building and operating the platform.

This is a high-visibility, high-impact role. The platform is the control plane behind an on-demand network services product, and its behavior is customer-visible: order-to-activation interval, provisioning success rate, and platform availability are experienced by customers through the portal. The Principal Architect is accountable for platform reliability, security posture, change safety, and delivery timelines, and partners with IT Platform Engineering to extend enterprise observability and AIOps capabilities into the network domain.

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the network automation platform, including application, orchestration, data, integration, and security layers, as a production software product with defined availability targets, release cadence, and support model.
• Design, build, and maintain a Python-based network-as-code platform, with Ansible and Terraform used as supporting technologies where appropriate.
• Build the platform as original software: the provisioning engine, service models, API layer, and data architecture are developed in-house, with open-source components consumed selectively as libraries rather than constituting the platform itself.
• Define and govern API-first architectures, including service contracts, versioning, authentication, and authorization for internal platform consumers.
• Design and evolve platform data models across document, graph, and time series databases to represent network state, service intent, topology relationships, and source of truth.
• Establish engineering standards through hands-on development, code review, automated testing, and technical design review.

• Own the northbound API contract consumed by the customer self-service portal, service catalog, feasibility and validation, order submission, provisioning status, and lifecycle operations.
• Design tenant isolation, authentication, authorization, and rate-limiting models appropriate to a control plane fulfilling customer-initiated orders submitted through the portal.
• Define idempotency, retry, compensation, and reconciliation semantics, so customer-initiated orders remain safe and consistent under partial failure.
• Partner with Product Management and portal engineering on service definitions, API contracts, and customer-visible status and error semantics.
• Establish measurement of order-to-activation interval, provisioning success rate, and platform availability as service levels customers experience through the portal.

• Own the automated service lifecycle for customer-facing network services, including L3
  
  VPN, Data Center Interconnect, IP Transit, and Layer 2 transport. This includes service modeling, intent capture, provisioning orchestration, pre-and post-change validation, and decommissioning.
• Architect orchestration workflows spanning the multi-service backbone: MPLS L3
  
  VPN and EVPN service instantiation, BGP peering and routing policy automation, segment routing policy, and DCI provisioning.
• Design service abstractions that allow the self-service portal, Service Delivery, and Network Operations to deliver customer services without device-level interaction.
• Design and maintain a vendor-abstraction layer and device driver framework spanning Arista, Cisco, and Fortinet, with Arista Cloud Vision Portal integrated as one of several southbound controllers.
• Implement state reconciliation, configuration drift…