Network Automation Engineer – Configuration Management (w/ active Secret)

About the role

Location: Norfolk, VA. Clearance: Secret. Type: Full-time, Onsite. Salary Range: $85,000 - $110,000. Critical Solutions has an immediate opening for a Network Automation Engineer - Configuration Management. The Configuration Management Engineer is responsible for ensuring the stability, consistency, and compliance of the enterprise network infrastructure. This role focuses on maintaining the lifecycle of network device configurations across all nodes (routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers). The engineer will eliminate manual errors and baseline drift by leveraging modern Network Management Systems (NMS) and advanced infrastructure-as-code automation frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Configuration Lifecycle & Baseline Management: Establish official baselines for all production network node types across the global footprint. Perform drift detection to continuously audit real-time configurations against approved gold standards. Manage configuration backups and rollback procedures to ensure rapid disaster recovery. Enforce compliance standards by executing automated remediation on non-compliant infrastructure nodes.
• NMS Tool Administration & Optimization: Administer NMS platforms (Cisco Catalyst Center, OpenText NNMi, OpenText Network Automation and others) for inventory discovery and configuration storage. Integrate Source-of-Truth systems (Nautobot) with the NMS to keep network topology and IPAM data synchronized. Configure alert thresholds within the NMS to flag unauthorized manual configuration changes instantly. Generate compliance reports for leadership and audit teams regarding network patch levels and vulnerabilities.
• Network Configuration Automation & CI/CD Pipeline Engineering: Write automation playbooks using tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Python to push global changes safely. Maintain Git repositories for the network infrastructure code, managing pull requests and peer configuration reviews. Build CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, Jenkins) to validate, lint, and dry-run network changes before deployment. Develop automated validation workflows to check network health before and after a change window.
• Change Control & Third-Tier Support: Review high-impact modifications to ensure