Senior Software Engineer - Network Automation

****No 3rd party resumes**** Sr. Software Engineer, Network Automation Direct-hire: $200-230k + $50-80k bonus target Hybrid 3-4 days onsite Location: Dallas, TX Job Description We are seeking an experienced Sr. Software Engineer, Network Automation. In this role, you will leverage your expertise in networking and software engineering to automate the provisioning and management of complex data center network environments. You will collaborate closely with network engineers, platform engineers, and security teams to ensure that our networking stack is reliable, secure, and efficient. This is a hands-on engineering role. You will lead the design and implementation of automation solutions that support large-scale compute infrastructure, drive architectural decisions, and raise the bar on how modern networks are programmatically managed. You will own meaningful projects end-to-end, from design through production. Responsibilities: Design, build, and maintain automation frameworks that simplify network provisioning and lifecycle management across global infrastructure.Contribute to architectural design discussions, ensuring automation is built for long-term maintainability and scalability.Develop software in Python and leverage tools such as Ansible, Terraform, and Jinja2 to implement software-driven network designs/IaC practices.Integrate network automation into CI/CD pipelines, enabling testable, repeatable, and reliable deployments.Build APIs and tooling to expose networking capabilities as self-service interfaces for engineering teams.Implement observability and telemetry workflows for network performance and availability using modern monitoring stacks.Collaborate with Network Engineering, Security, and Platform teams to deliver resilient and scalable automation solutions.Participate in on-call rotations, contributing to incident response, root cause analysis, and ongoing reliability improvements.Requirements: Proven experience spanning software development and network engineering, with direct ownership of automation and tooling projects.Strong programming skills in Python and solid software engineering fundamentals - testing, version control, CI/CD, code review.Experience with API design, service integration, or platform engineering.Familiarity with service discovery, secrets management, policy-as-code frameworks.Deep understanding of computer networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, load balancing, and network security concepts.Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and configuration management tools (Ansible, Terraform, Jinja2).Expertise in cloud native technologies including containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).Familiarity with distributed system concepts: microservice architecture, data consistency, fault tolerance strategies, security, and observability patterns.Strong problem-solving skills and comfort navigating ambiguity – you take ownership and drive projects to completion.Ability to collaborate effectively in cross-functional, agile engineering teams, and flexibility to adapt to fast-changing technical environments.Preferred: Experience with relational, NoSQL, or graph databases - we use a mix depending on the problem.Knowledge of event-driven or message-based architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ).Understanding of large-scale data center networking concepts and vendor ecosystems (Cisco, Arista, Juniper) and technologies such as segment routing, multitenant network designs.Deep understanding of routing, switching, firewalls, core protocols (BGP, OSPF, VRF, VLAN, ACL, firewall object groups etc.) and infrastructure design principles.Experience applying ML or AI techniques to infrastructure problems – for example predictive analytics, anomaly detection, or automated remediation workflows.Prior contributions to open-source networking or automation projects.