Lead Software Engineer - Network as a Product

You'll join CIE Automation within CIE Physical Plane, the organisation responsible for the global network connecting Nike's distribution centres, retail stores, offices, and data centres. Based in EMEA, the role builds the control plane used by regional network teams to manage network changes, working alongside the Lead Engineer to provide technical leadership across platform strategy and control plane engineering. The role partners closely with network engineers as they move from command-line operations to declarative infrastructure as code, and collaborates across Cloud Core Engineering.

• Build the network control plane by designing and building the providers, controllers and compositions that turn declared intent into device configuration, using Kubernetes, Crossplane, NetBox, NetWeave and GitOps patterns, and help shape how the architecture evolves.
• Own the Cisco control path by building and extending microservices that manage IOS-XE and NX-OS devices over NETCONF, including model handling, idempotency and failure behaviour that makes automation safe for production.
• Shape the intent model by working with network engineers to define the YAML specifications they use to express intent, balancing useful abstraction with the flexibility needed for real network requirements.
• Build the verification and auditability layer by developing pre-change validation to confirm expected network state and post-change verification to prove intended outcomes without unintended impact, and by ensuring the platform produces evidence for Change Control and CAB review, including diffs
• Rollback paths and blast radius.
• Make the developer experience good by giving engineers a fast, reliable way to develop, test and validate against the control plane locally without touching production.
• Migrate real networks onto the platform by moving production infrastructure onto the control plane one device class at a time without disruption, in a way that regional network teams trust and adopt.
• Bring SRE practice into the network by defining SLIs and SLOs, introducing RED and USE metrics, building operational dashboards, and using error budgets, toil reduction and blameless retrospectives to measure platform performance.
• Extend the platform into self-healing and closed-loop operations by building towards drift detection, automated remediation of known failure patterns, and guardrails that prevent automated actions from making a bad situation worse.
• Coordinate delivery across teams by working with regional network teams, Cloud Core Engineering and external partners to land changes end to end, set technical priorities and clear blockers.
• Raise the engineering bar by defining standards for code reviews, testing, repository structure, documentation and release processes, and making review expectations across SD-WAN, infrastructure as code, operational excellence and CaaP alignment concrete.
• Improve how the team works by challenging processes that create friction or rely on manual knowledge and establishing better, more repeatable ways of delivering engineering work.
• Grow the engineers around you by helping strong network engineers who are earlier in their software journey become confident, independent contributors, both technically and professionally.
• Use AI where it genuinely helps by applying AI tooling to areas such as code generation and review, test scaffolding, documentation, operations and diagnostics, while being clear about where it adds value and where it does not.

• Production experience with Go, or strong Python experience with a genuine appetite to work in Go.
• Production Kubernetes control plane engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with Crossplane providers, compositions and composite resource definitions.
• Strong experience with NETCONF, YANG and RESTCONF across IOS-XE and NX-OS.
• Hands-on knowledge of Catalyst 9000 and Nexus platforms, including their configuration, operational behaviour and failure modes.
• Deep understanding of routing and switching, including BGP, OSPF, VLANs and data centre fabrics, with the ability to reason about the impact of changes on live production networks.
• Experience designing schemas, APIs or intent models that other engineers consume, with sound judgement around abstraction, usability and long-term maintainability.
• Practical experience designing declarative delivery pipelines, release processes and testing strategies for infrastructure code, using approaches such as controller test harnesses, virtual labs and staged environments.
• Experience designing service boundaries, contracts and versioning, including resilient behaviour when dependent services are unavailable.
• Ability to set technical direction and influence experienced engineers without formal authority, particularly when introducing new engineering or automation practices.
• Ability to explain complex technical platforms and their value to engineers, programme managers, business stakeholders and senior leadership without losing necessary technical nuance.
• Experience using AI tooling thoughtfully within engineering workflows, with a clear view of where it improves quality, speed or reliability and where it does not.
• Strong opinions on how modern network control planes and network automation should evolve, including the role AI can play, with the ability to turn that thinking into technical direction.
• An automation-first mindset and enough networking credibility to work effectively with senior engineers across routing, switching and network infrastructure.
• Understanding of where automation adds value and where it does not, and ability to help move the organisation away from accumulated manual changes toward consistent infrastructure-as-code practices.