Senior Network Automation Engineer

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.

Opticore IT are currently searching for a Senior Network Automation Engineer who is operating at a CCNP level with strong general routing and switching knowledge to come and join the team. You'll join our excelling team, based in the London area 3-4 days a week, on a 6-month contract within the IR35 with scope to extend.

This opportunity to help automate all aspects of a growing, cutting-edge data centre and research platform. You'll build tooling, pipelines, and guardrails that turn network intent into safe, repeatable outcomes for their high-performance on-premise data centre.

• 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 Net Dev Ops  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

• 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 (Net Box, Nautobot etc.)
• Linux networking (iptables, DHCP, DNS) and strong Bash scripting
• Workflow orchestration (Temporal or equivalent)

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.