Job Title: Network Automation Engineer (F5 Focus)
Contract Length: 6 months
Day Rate: £575 per day
IR35 Status: Inside IR35
Role Overview
We are seeking an experienced Network Automation Engineer to design, build and maintain automation solutions across our network infrastructure, with a strong emphasis on F5 load balancer platforms. This role will focus on automating operational processes, improving reliability, reducing manual intervention, and enabling scalable, repeatable network changes.
You will work closely with network engineers, platform teams and DevOps functions to introduce robust automation practices using modern tooling, CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code principles.
We do not measure capability in years of experience — instead, we're looking for someone who can clearly demonstrate deep, hands-on expertise and a strong engineering mindset.
Key Responsibilities
* Design, develop and maintain network automation solutions, primarily targeting F5 load balancers and associated network services.
* Automate operational workflows such as provisioning, configuration changes, deployments, upgrades, validation and decommissioning.
* Develop and maintain Python-based automation frameworks, libraries and services.
* Build and consume REST APIs to integrate network platforms with internal systems and pipelines.
* Write clean, testable, production-ready code, including unit tests and peer code reviews.
* Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support automation deployments and testing.
* Work with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools to ensure consistency, version control and repeatability.
* Collaborate with network, security and platform teams to ensure automation aligns with architectural and security standards.
* Troubleshoot and resolve automation, pipeline and network-related issues.
* Produce clear technical documentation for automation workflows, tooling and operational processes.
* Contribute to continuous improvement of automation standards, patterns and best practices.
Required Technical Skills & Experience
Automation & Development
* Strong Python expertise, including:
* API development and integration
* Code testing (unit/integration)
* Code reviews and best practices
* Hands-on experience with automation and DevOps tooling, including:
* Bash scripting
* CI/CD tools (e.g. Jenkins or equivalent)
* Terraform
* Ansible
* HashiCorp Vault or similar secrets management solutions
Networking Knowledge
* Solid foundational understanding of core networking concepts:
* BGP
* Routing
* TCP/IP
* Certificates / PKI
* Practical experience with virtualisation platforms:
* VMware
* KVM
* Strong working knowledge of F5 load balancers, with experience automating:
* Configuration management
* Operational tasks