Senior Cisco ACI Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture & Deployment: Key member in deployment of new Cisco ACI fabrics including spine-leaf topology and APIC controllers. Continued support in day to day operations once ACI is deployed.
• Configuration & Policy Management: Define and implement ACI policies, tenants, VRFs, bridge domains, and contracts to meet business objectives.
• Leadership & Training: Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and hands-on training to junior engineers and operations staff. Develop internal knowledge-sharing sessions and documentation for ACI best practices.
• Integration & Optimization: Integrate ACI with virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V) and cloud environments.
• Monitoring & Troubleshooting: Utilize Nexus Dashboard, Catalyst Center, and other tools to monitor ACI health and resolve complex issues. Participate in an on-call rotation.
• Collaboration: Partner with network architects, security teams, and application owners to ensure secure and scalable deployments.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Strong understanding of the TCP/IP stack and relation to network technologies.
• Ability to administer a mixture of platforms and technologies including routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers.
• Expert-level knowledge of Cisco ACI architecture, APIC controllers, and Nexus 9000 series switches.
• Experience in building ACI environments from design to implementation.
• Sr. level troubleshooting skills in ACI and traditional data center route/switch.
• Strong understanding of network protocols (BGP, OSPF, VXLAN, MPLS).
• Proven experience in mentoring and training technical teams.
• Familiarity with ACI integrations (VMware vCenter, ServiceNow, cloud platforms).
• Excellent leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills.
• Loves to work in a collaborative team environment.
• Tier-4 Off-hour support may be required for maintenance windows and/or troubleshooting.
• Understanding of PCI security standards and practices.
• In-depth understanding of network documentation, physical and logical diagrams, and being able to provide detailed diagrams of solutions for engineers to follow and build from.
• Evaluating new technologies and creating/performing proof of concepts.
• On-call Support for Network Operations.
• CCIE level experience and knowledge.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cisco certifications such as CCNP Data Center or CCIE Data Center.
• Knowledge of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines for network automation.
• Proficiency in automation tools (Ansible, Python scripting).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines with ACI.
• Experience in firewalls and load balancers.
• Experience in Infrastructure as Code.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in network engineering with at least 5 years focused on Cisco ACI.
• Demonstrated ability to lead projects and train team members effectively.