Consulting Engineer

Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.

Meet the Team

As a Senior Network Consulting Engineer within Cisco Customer Experience (CX) Professional Services, you will serve as a premier technical authority and trusted advisor for our top-tier enterprise, service provider, and public sector clients across Italy and Southern Europe. You will lead the architectural design, deployment, migration, automation, and lifecycle optimization of mission-critical Data Center infrastructures powered by Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Nexus 9000 series switches, and VXLAN EVPN fabrics.

This senior consulting role bridges deep hands-on engineering capabilities with strategic customer consulting, leading multi-functional delivery engagements, mentoring regional engineers, and accelerating client transition toward software-defined, automated, and AI-ready data center networks.

Your Impact

• End-to-End Solution Architecture & Delivery: Lead the end-to-end planning, High-Level Design (HLD), Low-Level Design (LLD), staging, deployment, and Day-2 acceptance testing for large-scale Cisco Data Center network environments.
• Hands-on Cisco ACI & VXLAN Fabric Expertise: Design, configure, and troubleshoot Cisco ACI controller clusters (APIC), multi-tenancy models, VRFs, Bridge Domains (BDs), Application Network Profiles (ANPs), Endpoint Groups (EPGs), Contracts, and Micro-segmentation policies. Deploy Multi-Pod (IPN), Multi-Site Orchestrator (NDO / Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator), Remote Leaf, and standalone Nexus VXLAN EVPN fabrics.
• Complex Network Migrations & MOP Authoring: Develop comprehensive migration architectures, detailed Method of Procedure (MOP) documentation, and contingency fallback plans to transition legacy environments (classic 3-tier, vPC, FabricPath) into programmable ACI/VXLAN fabrics with zero or minimal service disruption.
• Hybrid Work Mode Availability (Rome & Milan Hubs): This role operates in a flexible Hybrid work model. You will balance productive remote/virtual delivery with scheduled onsite engagements at customer data center facilities, client executive briefing centers, and local Cisco offices in Rome (preferred site) and Milan (Vimercate / Milan Hub) as required by project milestones, architectural workshops, and critical cutovers.
• Trusted Technical Advisor & Stakeholder Engagement: Establish trusted advisor relationships with customer Chief Architects, IT Directors, and NetOps teams, translating high-level business goals into robust, resilient, and secure technical architectures.
• Network Automation & Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Drive deployment velocity, consistency, and compliance by building and integrating network automation scripts using Python (ACI Cobra SDK / Arya), Ansible ACI modules, Terraform ACI Provider, and REST APIs.
• L4–L7 Integration & Security Service Chaining: Architect seamless integration of Layer 4–7 services (Cisco Secure Firewall ASA/FTD, third-party firewalls, and F5/Citrix load balancers) via ACI Service Graphs, L2Out, and L3Out (BGP/OSPF).
• Technical Leadership, Mentorship & Quality Governance: Provide technical oversight and rigorous peer review of High-Level and Low-Level designs across the regional delivery team; coach and mentor junior and mid-level consulting engineers.
• Secondary skills: any additional competence on top of DC will be a plus.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Experience & Track Record: Typically requires a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Telecommunications, Electronic Engineering (or equivalent technical background) along with 8+ years of hands‑on professional services or network consulting experience in enterprise/SP Data Center environments.
• Industry Certifications: Active Cisco CCIE Data Center or CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure / Routing & Switching certification (or equivalent validated expert-level industry mastery).
• Deep Cisco ACI Architecture: Expert knowledge of ACI fabric design, Spine-Leaf topologies, APIC controller cluster management, Tenant isolation, VRF routing, BDs, EPGs, Contracts, Micro-segmentation, ACI Multi-Pod (IPN), and Multi-Site (NDO).
• Nexus & VXLAN EVPN Expertise: Extensive hands‑on configuration of Cisco Nexus 9000, 7000, 5000 switches running NX-OS. In-depth mastery of VXLAN overlays with BGP EVPN control plane, distributed anycast gateways, Symmetric IRB, and Data Center Interconnect (DCI).
• Routing & Switching Mastery: Advanced proficiency with core internetworking protocols: BGP (iBGP, eBGP, MP-BGP), OSPF, IS-IS, Segment Routing, vPC, STP, QoS, Multicast (PIM-SM/Bidir), and Layer 2/3 encapsulation.
• Day-2 Assurance & Operations: Practical experience with Cisco Nexus Dashboard, Nexus Dashboard Insights (NDI), Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDF