Penta Consulting are a technology service provider and leading outsourced partner helping to deliver professional and managed solutions across EMEA.
We're looking for a DevOps Consultant to spearhead the implementation and ongoing management of Network as Code (NAC) solutions for a key enterprise customer. You'll be the go‑to expert for CI/CD pipelines, automation workflows, and infrastructure‑as‑code practices within a complex Cisco networking environment.
This is a hands‑on, high‑impact role where you'll shape automation strategy, build scalable delivery pipelines, and guide customer teams through a modern DevOps transformation.
What You'll Do
- Pipeline Engineering: Build and maintain end‑to‑end CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps, enabling automated Cisco network configuration and deployment.
- Automation Development: Develop high‑quality Ansible playbooks, roles, and collections tailored for Cisco's NAC ecosystem.
- Infrastructure as Code: Create and manage Terraform configurations for network infrastructure, providers, and state management.
- Version Control Leadership: Define branching strategies, manage PR workflows, and lead code reviews across GitHub/GitLab.
- Standards & Governance: Establish YAML‑based configuration standards and documentation for all automation artifacts.
- Operational Excellence: Troubleshoot pipeline failures, optimise execution times, and ensure reliability across the automation framework.
- Technical Advisory: Serve as the SME for DevOps best practices, GitOps workflows, and automation scaling strategies.
Required Skills & Experience
- Azure DevOps (Primary): Deep expertise in Azure Pipelines, environments, and service connections. Able to build complex multi‑stage pipelines from scratch.
- Ansible: Advanced experience with network automation, especially within Cisco NAC environments.
- Terraform: Strong understanding of provider configuration, state management, and module development.
- YAML: High proficiency in writing clean, maintainable YAML for pipelines and configuration files.
- Git: Expert‑level knowledge of branching models, merge conflict resolution, and PR workflows.
- DevOps Practices: Hands‑on experience implementing CI/CD and GitOps for infrastructure or networking.
Preferred Skills
- Solid understanding of Cisco networking (ACI, Catalyst/Nexus, routing protocols).
- Python scripting for automation extensions or data manipulation.
- Experience integrating tools via REST APIs.
