Principal Network Engineer (Network Automation)

Location: Fully remote across the UK or Ireland

Salary: £90,000–£110,000 per annum; package states up to £115,000 plus bonus.

Company

hirify.global is a global payments technology company operating network infrastructure across data centres and public cloud.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction for network engineering across data centres and public cloud.
• Manage switches, routers, firewalls and cloud networking through Terraform, Ansible and vendor APIs, with automated validation before production changes.
• Build self-service capabilities for network segments, VPCs, firewall rules and private connectivity with policy checks and guardrails.
• Design Palo Alto segmentation, firewall policy as code, routing and switching using BGP and VXLAN/EVPN, plus load balancing and traffic steering as code.
• Build PCI DSS and SOX controls, automated backups, drift detection, audit evidence, telemetry, flow data and alerting.
• Run the systems in production, including on-call and failover testing, while mentoring senior engineers and leading major design and build-versus-buy decisions.

Requirements

• Extensive experience as a principal or lead network engineer in production enterprise environments.
• Expertise in BGP, OSPF, VXLAN/EVPN and networking in AWS, Azure, OCI or GCP.
• Experience with firewall policy and segmentation in regulated environments, ideally involving PCI DSS and SOX.
• Proven network automation using Terraform, Ansible, vendor APIs and a network source of truth.
• Production-quality coding in Python, Go or similar, using Git, pull requests and CI rather than only procedural scripts.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, with a safety-first approach to reviewing agent output.
• Clear technical writing and confidence explaining design trade-offs and advocating for new approaches.

Nice to have

• Palo Alto, including Panorama, Juniper and Cisco experience.
• Experience with HAProxy Enterprise, HashiCorp Consul, NetBox, Cloudflare and Splunk.
• Experience designing or reviewing MCP servers for AI agents.

Culture & Benefits

• Fully remote team working across the US and Europe.
• Autonomous, hands-on role with weekly coding and daily use of AI tools.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Pension with a 5% employer contribution, rising to 7% after three years.
• Private medical insurance including optical and dental coverage.