Core Routing/IP Backbone Engineer

About the role

The Core Routing/IP Backbone Engineer will support the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), a DOE-funded high-performance network connecting national labs, universities, and research institutions worldwide. This role involves designing, deploying, operating, and supporting network infrastructure and peering architectures for ESnet's production and research environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and support routing, switching, optical, and transport infrastructure across ESnet’s production and research networks.
• Configure and troubleshoot advanced networking technologies including IPv4/IPv6, BGP, IS-IS, MPLS, Segment Routing, RSVP, QoS, and L2/L3 VPNs.
• Support network operations, maintenance, upgrades, incident response, and service restoration.
• Develop automation tools and operational workflows to improve scalability, reliability, and efficiency.
• Collaborate with engineers, scientific stakeholders, vendors, carriers, and partner organizations to deliver and maintain network services.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, procedures, and network standards.
• Contribute to process improvements, troubleshoot moderate-complexity issues, and provide trusted technical guidance to stakeholders.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for business-hours and after-hours operational support.

Requirements

• Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 3 years and a Master’s degree; or equivalent work experience.
• Minimum of five years of relevant experience designing, deploying, operating, and troubleshooting network infrastructure and services.
• Demonstrated experience working with enterprise, service provider, research, or large-scale WAN/LAN environments.
• Demonstrated knowledge and hands-on experience with IP networking technologies and carrier-grade services including MPLS, QoS, traffic engineering, Layer 2/Layer 3 VPN technologies, and related service provider architectures.
• Strong understanding of network troubleshooting methodologies with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex routing, transport, and end-to-end service issues across distributed wide-area infrastructures.
• Experience administering and operating multi-vendor routing platforms, preferably Juniper and Nokia (Alcatel-Lucent), in production backbone or carrier-class environments.
• Experience working in UNIX/Linux command-line environments, including remote systems administration, scripting fundamentals, and network automation workflows.
• Experience contributing to technical projects involving backbone deployments, network service implementations, migration planning, testing, operational readiness, and production support.
• Strong analytical, organizational, and problem-solving skills with the ability to manage operational and engineering issues of moderate to high complexity in large-scale network environments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering teams, operations groups, vendors, carriers, and scientific stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in a highly collaborative, cross-functional technical environment supporting mission-critical network infrastructure.
• Experience using collaboration, ticketing, documentation, monitoring, and operational support tools within network engineering or service provider operations environments.

Qualifications

• Typically requires a minimum of 8 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or equivalent experience.
• Expert level capabilities in router configuration, including experience with several vendors.
• Experience in managing traffic flows in a production network using analytical tools, ECMP, traffic engineering and similar approaches.
• Project Management experience including demonstrated expertise in developing technical project scope, schedule and budget.
• Ability to resolve complex issues in creative and effective ways.
• Ability to network and collaborate with key contacts outside their own area of expertise.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively as part of a cross-disciplinary team.

Skills

• Experience working in Research & Education (R&E), scientific computing, backbone, or service provider networking environments.
• Experience with network automation, model-driven telemetry, APIs, YANG/NETCONF, or infrastructure-as-code methodologies.
• Familiarity with large-scale peering ecosystems, interdomain routing, and high-capacity backbone operations.
• Experience participating in on-call operational support rotations for production WAN or backbone network environments.

Benefits

We offer exceptional health and retirement benefits, including pension or 401K-style plans. Berkeley Lab is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace, and we are invested in our teams. We provide parental bonding leave (for both mothers and fathers), pet insurance, and a Winter Holiday Shutdown each year.

Pay

Pay details are not specified in this posting.

Schedule

Schedule details are not specified in this posting.