Senior Network Development Engineer

Role purpose:

The Network Development Engineer is accountable for the design, deployment and support of network fabric and systems through a combination of a deep level understanding of networking at the protocol level coupled with programming skills to support the intensive automation required to operate a production environment. This role is accountable for network solutions and detailed designs considering specifics like room location, TOR, raw row, hardware and stock allocation, Subnets, VLANs, etc.. and including capacity and performance management. 

The Network Development Engineer contributes to architecture design process working closely with Network Architects and following their guidance, understanding impact on the associated environments, ensuring availability of supporting business and enabling Network infrastructure within Data Centers or external service providers. Role holder participates in Network lifecycle management through network build and/or upgrade projects. Collaborates with program/project managers to develop milestones and deliverables. Will primarily use existing procedures and tools to develop and safely execute network change. However, may have to develop new procedures and deployment documentation from time to time. Serves as technical lead for team projects. Contributes to the development of roadmap and has responsibility for developing standalone features.

Being part of an Agile team, acts as Technical Product Owner of one of the Network Engineering product lines and provides the vision and direction to the Scrum team throughout the development lifecycle. Managing stakeholders and market needs the Technical Product Owner is responsible in aligning the team to deliver top notch features, market value and increase the customer satisfaction and other related KPIs of his/her product. The role is responsible for supporting the creation of user stories to an adequate level of granularity, assessing options for technical and business feasibility, and ensuring development is aligned to business outcomes. Provides regular feedback by testing deliverables against a user story’s acceptance criteria and provides regular feedback by validating that the product meets the business goals. NDE provides third level support and remediation for escalated major network incidents. Leads post-event root cause analysis. Coordinates with networking automation services for the development and integration of support tooling. Frequently develops scripts to automate routine tasks. Collaborate with network vendor technical account team and internal Quality Assurance team to drive bug resolution and assist in the qualification of new firmware and/or operating systems. 

• This role is responsible for mapping of the operational capacity, availability, and performance of the reference solutions against SLAs from level three support perspective.
• The role is responsible providing business information during release and iteration planning, as well as supporting the review, refine and re-prioritization of the release backlog.

Key accountabilities and decision ownership:

• Work with Private and Public Cloud service providers to forecast and right-size long-term capacity and performance requirements, iterating regularly
• Determine user and technical story impact on existing architecture, work processes and systems
• Design and implement supporting platform/infrastructure/network and tooling for software module development, orchestration and operations
• Design and implement supporting database and middleware capabilities to support software module development and operations
• Monitor and maintain Platform/infrastructure/network performance, capacity and availability
• Define product vision and strategy, road-map and growth opportunities according to stakeholders and market needs
• Work with the Lead Product Owner to define and prioritize the user stories aligned to the capability roadmap, providing a systems perspective
• Assess value, develop cases, and prioritize stories, epics and themes to ensure work focuses on those with maximum value
• Plan and prioritize product feature backlog, manage the backlog throughout iterations, plan and refine user stories while explicitly ensuring transparency to all Scrum team members on what the definition of “Done” for each item.
• Work with UI/UX designer to outline customer journeys
• Mitigate impediments with Scrum master and impact successful team completion of Release/Sprint Goals
• Work with Development team on the analysis of features and product backlog increments, ensuring they are all aware of the business value of each item
• Ensure user stories are broken down to an adequate level of detail for execution by engineering
• Support the development of and execution of acceptance tests based on acceptance criteria, verifying stories meet acceptance criteria
• Analyse and report delivery risks and opportunities

Key performance indicators:

• Solution/Platform/Infrastructure/Network Availability
• Product Performance & Development
• Platform/network related P1incidents

Core competencies, knowledge and experience:

• Network knowledge, network management & network design experience in large scale Datacenter environment (e.g. Cisco ACI networking and various SDN technologies).
• Experience with networking protocols such as TCP/IP, VPN, DNS, DHCP, and SSL.
• Infrastructure & Network automation and configuration of the management tools, e.g. (Puppet, Chef, Ansible);
• Public and private cloud IaaS and PaaS product engineering models and technologies, e.g. (Openstack, AWS, Azure) & preferably two or more programming and scripting languages, e.g. Python, Java, PHP, Ruby
• Understanding of fundamentals of software development processes and procedures, as well as supporting systems and architecture
• User story definition and refinement and team backlog management
• User and technical acceptance test design, execution, and validation
• Customer experience design of digital products and services
• Data-driven decision making
• Good understanding of the business capability / user journey, wider organizational goals, and desired product business outcomes

Must have technical/professional qualifications:

• Master’s or Bachelor’s Degree or technical institute certificate in Computer Science, Information Systems or other related field
• 7+ years of work experience in designing, developing, deploying and / or administering Network infrastructure solutions at the expert certification level
• Experience of current and emerging virtualization, infrastructure, and cloud network technologies and architectures such SDN ACI, SD WAN, NSX, Amazon, OCI, Azure, Google networks
• Experience working closely with agile methodologies, such as Scrum, XP, and with teams leveraging DevOps and Continuous Delivery / Integration
• Strong understanding of IT management best practice frameworks, such as ITIL
• Professional experience and knowledge of the Telecommunications industry strongly preferred
• Excellent organizational, verbal, and written communication skills

Direct reports: None, may coordinate some external resources

Dotted reports: Project based, may be part of project structures.

Who we are

You may have already heard of Vodafone – We’re a leading Telecommunications company in Europe and Africa. But what you might not know is that we are continuously investing in new technologies to improve the lives of millions of customers, businesses and people around the world, creating a better future for everyone.

As part of our global family, whether that’s Vodafone, Vodacom or _VOIS, you’ll feel a sense of pride and purpose as you contribute to our culture of innovation. We pursue equality of opportunity and inclusion for all candidates through our employment policies and practices. We recognise and celebrate the importance of diversity and inclusivity in our workspace and we do not tolerate any form of discrimination especially related to but not limited to race, colour, age, veteran status, gender identification, sexual orientation, pregnancy, ethnicity, disability, religion, political affiliation, trade union membership, nationality, indigenous status, medical condition, HIV status, social origin, cultural background, social, or marital status.

Together we can.

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