Technical Lead/Architect

Role: Technical Lead / Architect

Location: London, Bristol or Birmingham (Hybrid - 3 days each week on site)

Duration: 6 Months

Day Rate: 700 - 750 per day inside IR35

Experience:

• Strong hands on experience in Cisco data centre networking (NX OS, VXLAN EVPN)
• Proven ability to build and support automation in production environments
• Comfortable working across networking and software tooling
• Experience working in structured delivery environments with change control and governance
• Strong problem solving and troubleshooting skills across both network and automation layers
• Ability to work collaboratively with TDA, delivery, testing and operations teams

Essential skills

• Cisco NX OS, including VXLAN BGP EVPN, vPC, SNMPv3, TACACS+
• Cisco NDFC including fabric templates, Recalculate and Deploy, out of sync detection and image management.
• EVPN VXLAN and multi site EVPN architecture, including live production migration design and rollback within constrained change windows.
• Python for production quality automation and REST API integration (e.g. NDFC, ServiceNow, Infoblox, Red Hat AAP, Sentinel, Vault), including use of Python data structures to model intent and state.
• YAML data modelling, including Ansible role and playbook design.
• JSON data handling and schema validation, including understanding of JSON as an interchange format alongside Python dictionaries and YAML, and basic schema based validation concepts to support automation testing and assurance workflows (e.g. pyATS outputs, API responses).
• GitHub/Gitlab, including self hosted runner configuration, OIDC token handling, environment protection rules and workflow dispatch.
• pyATS and Genie, including testbed construction, NX OS parser usage, assertion patterns and automated rollback triggers on validation failure.
• GitOps principles, with Git treated as the control plane, including idempotency, branch protection, signed commits and four eyes enforcement via pipeline gates.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform including execution environment design (container based), job template configuration and dynamic inventory integration (e.g. NetBox).
• Experience producing HLD/LLD documentation aligned to FCA / PRA regulated delivery standards, with decisions traceable to requirements and explicit risk acceptance.
• NetBox 4.x data modelling, custom fields and automation integration.

Desirable skills

• Batfish / pybatfish for pre change network analysis, regression testing and pre/post comparison.
• VMware NSX T / NSX 4.x integration with EVPN fabrics.
• Docker container including building, installing, running and operating containers used to package automation tooling, test frameworks and execution environments (for example CI runners or Ansible execution environments). Familiarity with additional automation, testing or orchestration tooling where required by specific work packages, recognising that the toolset may evolve over time.

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