Principal Network Engineer (Data Centre)

About Ingenuity

THG Ingenuity solves global and local challenges for its partners, including, Nestle, P&G and Hotel Chocolat by delivering a seamless, effective and scalable direct-to-consumer retail model by incorporating all the required components for global digital commerce into a single, digital platform. This enables THG to offer brands access to every product and service required to launch and scale a global e-commerce solution through a single SaaS relationship, which eradicates the complexity and cost of multi-partner relationships.  Built to empower both brands and customers alike, the Ingenuity ecosystem takes all the pieces needed for successful e-commerce propositions, and places them under one roof.

About the Network team and Your Role

As a function of the Global Infrastructure Services department, the Network team is charged with designing, operating and maintaining global network infrastructure as well as public and private network connectivity for the Group. Services are broadly categorized into Data Centre networking, Global Connectivity, Product Development, Enterprise networking and Customer Operations.

Reporting directly to the Head of Networks, the role is responsible for ongoing technical development and delivery of Data Centre network infrastructures and associated services across the Group.

• Take responsibility for the technical development, implementation and maintenance of data centre network infrastructures globally.
• Develop deep technical skills and become subject matter expert (SME) in data centre networking tech stack – e.g. switching fabric architecture, firewalling, load balancing as well as virtualized and container networking.
• Continually learn new technologies and approaches, seeking best-practice implementations for THG to improve data centre reliability, quality, automation and cost-efficiency. Promote sharing of this with all team mates to evangelize new approaches.
• Ensure data centre network architectures are scalable, fit-for-purpose and robust, underpinning and supporting mission critical workloads such that they can run anywhere within the network.
• With a focus on what customer success looks like, aim to ensure data centre network services are designed to support a variety of customer workloads – be that bare metal, hypervisor/virtualized or cloud-native platforms.
• Collaborate with peers and colleagues across the business to produce both short- and mid-term plans for the data centre technology stack. This includes regular maintenance activities such as software upgrades and audits.
• Define use cases for automation within the data centre space, collaborating with automation colleagues to define their implementation.
• Day-to-day supervision of a small team of network engineers, enabling you to execute to plan and deliver both internal and business-sponsored projects on time.
• Participate in the network on-call schedule with colleagues between the UK and US to ensure mission critical services have appropriate operational and/or escalation-level support.

 

Role Requirements

• Solid knowledge of data centre networking technologies and protocols, including but not limited to
  • Leaf, Spine, Super-Spine Clos architectures
  • MP-BGP, BGP-EVPN, VXLAN, GENEVE and associated mechanisms
  • Virtualization (e.g. KVM/VMware) and cloud-native (Docker, Kubernetes) architectures are desirable
• Hands-on experience configuring the following products
  • Ethernet/IP switching products devices from Cisco and/or Arista are essential.
  • Disaggregated switching products such as Mellanox running network operating systems (NOS) such as Cumulus Linux is mandatory (SONiC would be advantageous).
  • Security/firewalling products from Fortinet (specifically FortiGate and/or Cisco ASA)
  • Application delivery controllers from Citrix (specifically NetScaler). Experience with HA Proxy and/or Nginx advantageous.
• Experience in network automation techniques with Python and/or Ansible with version control systems such as Git is essential. This will preferably include exposure to REST APIs, NETCONF, gNMI, etc.
• Exposure to Linux administration and docker containers would be advantageous.
• Understanding of monitoring requirements and hands-on knowledge of open source monitoring tools (e.g. LibreNMS, InfluxDB/Grafana).
• Occasional travel to work in remote sites/locations as required by the business.
• Desire to learn and deepen personal knowledge of networking technology.
• “Make-it-happen” attitude and ownership to all activities.

 

Opening Date: 16/05/2023

Closing Date: 30/05/2023

Salary: Competitive