Network & Security Automation Engineer

We are hiring a Network & Security Automation Engineer for a 6+ month contract position based in Plano, Texas. This role involves engineering support for network projects, advanced troubleshooting, network automation, and infrastructure maintenance across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. You will work with core networking technologies including LAN, WAN, routing, switching, AWS connectivity, and security platforms such as firewalls, proxies, load balancers, DDoS, SASE, DNS, and VPN.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement network automation solutions to reduce repetitive manual health checks and eliminate human error, leveraging Python programming and NetDevOps practices
• Design and maintain automation using APIs, data structures (SQL, JSON, YAML, XML), Ansible configuration management, playbooks, and version control tools including GitHub and GitLab
• Lead technical discussions to understand business requirements and translate them into functional specifications and comprehensive design documentation
• Manage implementation processes from design through customer acceptance, including testing and support for new deployments, expansions, environment refreshes, and upgrades
• Provide engineering support for project design, implementation, and deployment across various network environments
• Perform advanced troubleshooting to identify, resolve, and provide root cause analysis of network-related issues
• Assist with maintaining network co-locations and LAN/WAN infrastructure for small, regional, large office, and campus environments
• Support large complex data network infrastructure using network monitoring and management tools
• Provide LAN routing, switching, wireless, and security configuration and deployment assistance
• Execute configuration standardization, upgrades, and vulnerability remediation in a timely manner
• Plan and execute OS upgrades on various network platforms while maintaining current standards
• Participate in and respond to network and security incidents
• Perform system and network analysis using tools such as packet capture, application performance management, syslog, Netbrain, Aternity, Observe, and Arkime
• Provide technical support leadership on problem calls and major incident bridges
• Maintain documentation and contribute to enterprise learning platforms based on user reports and experience
• Provide peer reviews of implementations, configurations, and documentation for team members
• Create technical deliverables including physical and logical network diagrams, network assessments, capacity planning, detailed design documents, runbooks, configurations, and change orders
• Interface with multiple teams across business areas, network architecture, cloud governance, and network tools management on feature developments and enterprise initiatives

Qualifications

• Required

• Bachelor''s degree in a related field

• At least 3 years of network security and network infrastructure support experience

• At least 2 years of experience with packet capture tools such as Wireshark and TCPdump

• At least 2 years of experience configuring, supporting, and troubleshooting firewalls, site-to-site IPSec VPN connections, and Network Address Translation (NAT)

• At least 2 years of experience with AWS Cloud and/or DevOps technology

• Advanced knowledge of Python programming focused on network automation

• Thorough understanding of data structures including SQL, JSON, YAML, and XML

• Experience using APIs for network automation

• Proficiency in GitHub, GitLab, and using Co-Pilot

• Experience with Ansible configuration management, collections, and writing playbooks

• Familiarity with Agile software development tools including Atlassian Confluence and Jira

• Preferred

• 3+ years of experience with network automation and Python programming

• 4+ years of experience in network communications, troubleshooting networks, security, and cloud-based solutions

• Proficiency in troubleshooting router and switch hardware