Staff Software Engineer – Network Automation

Description

The company is a subsidiary of a larger parent group and builds gaming hardware and network services used by more than 100 million people.

It is also a major entertainment business that owns some of the best-known intellectual property in the world.

The team is building the next generation of network automation platforms, and this is a Staff-level role with significant technical influence.

The gaming network runs across more than 40 interconnection locations and over 20 data centres worldwide. Operating it safely means replacing specialist-led workflows and one-off automation tools with reliable declarative software.

You will help lead that shift and set the technical direction for it, combining hands-on engineering with architecture, design writing, cross-team alignment and mentoring. The work will shape how a very large gaming network is operated, and the patterns you set will be reused across several network domains and services.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical direction for network automation and infrastructure control platforms. Treat the self-service network API as a product: agree outcomes and API behaviour with users and partner teams, set clear reliability expectations, clarify who owns what, and hold the team to those commitments.
• Run domain-driven design sessions with network experts, software engineers and API consumers to agree a shared vocabulary and bounded contexts, then turn those agreements into versioned, testable contracts.
• Design and build APIs, services, controllers and reconciliation workflows that change production infrastructure safely at scale.
• Build on the Kubernetes API, including custom resources and control loops that keep actual state converging toward declared intent.
• Own the operational Kubernetes path: CRD rollout, RBAC and admission, controller health, Helm packaging, drift detection and incident diagnosis.
• Design distributed workflows that behave correctly under eventual consistency, at-least-once delivery, concurrent writes and partial failure, with idempotency and safe recovery built in from the start.
• Design stable APIs, schemas and data models used across team boundaries, including versioning and backwards compatibility.
• Create patterns for multi-tenant infrastructure platforms covering tenant isolation, authorization, policy enforcement and safe limits on automation.
• Set strong standards for testing, observability and change safety in software that modifies live infrastructure.
• Improve delivery practices through automated CI gates, versioned artifacts, controlled promotion, and safe deployment and rollback strategies.
• Lead complex migrations and modernisation of existing automation, services and data models. Decide whether components should be evolved, replaced or rewritten, and make sure old and new paths coexist safely, behave compatibly, and are eventually retired.
• Work with software, networking, operations and architecture teams to reach technical alignment. Make decisions within your area, contribute to decisions owned by others, and choose technologies based on long-term value to the company and its products.
• Mentor engineers, lead technical and design reviews, and raise engineering standards across the wider organisation.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in a backend language such as Python, Go, Rust or Java, including async concurrency, static typing, data modelling and validation, API development, and packaging and tooling.
• Strong experience building Kubernetes controllers or operators, including custom resources and reconciliation or control-loop patterns.
• Strong experience building event-driven distributed systems, especially with eventual consistency, at-least-once delivery, idempotency, optimistic concurrency and partial-failure handling.
• Experience designing and building self-service, multi-tenant platforms, including tenant isolation, policy and access control.
• Strong API and schema design skills, including versioning and schema evolution for interfaces that other teams and systems depend on.
• Proven technical leadership across team boundaries: driving architecture, building agreement among senior technical stakeholders, and mentoring engineers.
• A record of taking ambiguous, technically complex problems from architecture through to reliable production systems that manage large-scale infrastructure such as networks, compute or cloud resources.
• Solid networking fundamentals, particularly BGP, IP fabrics and VXLAN, EVPN and L3VPN.
• Working knowledge of Go, enough to understand and contribute to adjacent services and controllers.
• Experience designing testing and observability strategies for production infrastructure automation, including systems and backends that cannot be fully reproduced in CI.
• Experience with graph databases or source-of-truth systems that model infrastructure and its relationships.

Conditions

Background checks are carried out at the offer stage for all new employees and may include criminal background checks for some roles, which means personal information will be processed for that purpose.