Network Operations Engineer, Sovereign Operations, Hampshire

The United Kingdom Sovereign Operations team in Google Public Sector delivers, operates and secures private cloud services. We aim to provide the flexibility, reliability, and scalability of public cloud for customers with high security requirements that can only be met in a private cloud environment. We deliver and operate these private cloud deployments for the most critical customers, helping scale, secure and maintain the deployment and working closely with Google product teams to continually improve our technology.

As a Network Operations Engineer, you will be part of a team of engineers that deploys and operates our private cloud services and underlying networks for critical customers in the UK. You will design and operate reliable and resilient networks, automate changes, implement monitoring, and manage core network components. Your work will bridge cloud native infrastructure engineering and platform networking, focusing on software defined networking within a Kubernetes architecture. You will be the glue that keeps containerized, and cloud-hosted services up and running, responsible for configuring and maintaining cloud platform infrastructure, virtual networking resources, and automation workflows from inception to optimization and will participate in an on-call rotation to ensure incidents can be swiftly resolved.
Must be a British citizen to meet compliance and security clearance requirements. The office location will be a satellite site in Hampshire, with occasional travel to London. This is an on-site position, requiring a standard five day per week schedule in the office.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Networking, Information Security, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3 years of experience with Linux Systems Administration and kernel level/data plane cloud native networking.
• Experience with one or more scripting languages e.g. Python, Bash, Poweshell.
• Experience with designing and implementing resilient, secure networks using a wide range of technologies.
• Active, or the ability to obtain, a Developed Vetting (DV) UK security clearance.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience deploying and operating production workloads in Kubernetes.
• Experience designing and implementing configuration management solutions to enable network and cloud platform operations (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, or Puppet).
• Understanding of the Kubernetes networking model, along with experience debugging CNI plugin (e.g., Cilium) configurations and Service Mesh (e.g., Istio) architectures.
• Excellent partner management, follow-through, resourcefulness, attention to detail, and verbal and written communication skills.
• Current and active UK Security Check (SC) or UK Developed Vetting (DV) security clearance.

Responsibilities:

• Engage and improve the whole life cycle of secure cloud platform network systems.
• Assist Engineering and Operations teams in building an ecosystem of integration, empowering software automation to scale within private/secure networks.
• Maintain, secure, and debug cross-cluster communications in an air-gapped kubernetes infrastructure using Cilium for eBPF-based container networking and Istio for microservice communication.
• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by implementing changes that improve network reliability, security and performance.
• Work cross-functionally to drive Infrastructure as Code and GitOps pipelines, ensuring network configurations are deployed programmatically. Provide highly technical implementation and operational support in customer environments, including guidance on implementation feasibility of cross-product integrations.