Virtual Tech Gurus
Description
Latest Update:
- Looking to bring someone in to help execute roughly 50 Arista 7150 end-of-life switch refreshes across their markets/co-location environment. The replacement hardware is already available. The person needs to own the migrations from planning through cutover.
The job involves:
- Arista 7150/7060/7130 environments
- Low-latency financial/market-data networks
- BGP and Layer 3 routing
- Multicast, PIM/SSM, IGMP
- Physical switch/cabling migrations
- Staging and configuration
- Change management and approvals
- End-user communication
- Data center operations coordination
- Friday night/Saturday production cutovers
- Pre/post migration validation
- Troubleshooting and rollback
Must-Have Skills
- Arista switching experience — specifically Arista 7150, 7060, and/or 7130
- Low-latency financial/market network experience
- Network hardware refresh / migration experience — taking an end-of-life switch out and replacing it with a newer platform
- Layer 2 & Layer 3 switching
- BGP — configuration, peering, route advertisement, route validation
- Multicast networking — particularly PIM, SSM, and IGMP
- Market-data / trading network experience in financial services or co-location environments
- Production network cutovers/migrations with minimal downtime
- Pre- and post-migration validation — routing, interfaces, errors, traffic, reachability, BGP, etc.
- Change management — raising changes, obtaining approvals, coordinating migration windows
- Data center / co-location experience
- Hands-on cabling/physical migration experience — SFP/QSFP, optics, breakout cables, moving physical connections
- Migration planning and rollback planning
- Weekend/off-hours production support — Friday nights/Saturdays due to market-hour restrictions
- Strong communication with end users, data center operations, and engineering teams
Strongly Preferred
- Arista 7130 experience, particularly the low-latency/multicast use cases
- Arista 7060 experience
- Cisco/Juniper → Arista migrations
- Financial trading / market-data environments
- VXLAN familiarity
- Ansible or automated pre/post migration validation
- Firewall migration experience — Palo Alto, Juniper, Fortinet
Description:
- This role supports a network refresh program replacing approximately 60 end-of-life switches (Arista 7150 and Cisco) across exchange co-location environments supporting mission-critical trading infrastructure. Work is executed within strictly limited weekend change windows with zero-downtime requirements. The engineer will work alongside the EMEA Regional Manager (London-based), operating at pace, adapting quickly to unexpected changes, and executing with precision and independence.
Key Responsibilities
- Execute replacement and migration of ~60 end-of-life Arista 7150 and Cisco switches across exchange co-location environments
- Apply and validate customized switch configurations accurately within limited change windows
- Manage and maintain external connectivity to exchanges and extranet environments
- Configure and troubleshoot BGP and multicast routing in live trading environments
- Ensure zero-downtime delivery across all migration and change activity
- Resolve complex network issues independently with minimal escalation
- Liaise directly with exchanges, external parties, and internal engineering teams at a technical level
Mandatory Requirements
- Availability to work every weekend for change window execution
- Financial services/trading industry experience — exchange or co-location environments strongly preferred
- Hands-on Arista experience, including the 7150 series
- Firewall experience in complex network environments
- Extranet connectivity experience
- Strong BGP and multicast knowledge in production environments
- Proven ability to troubleshoot complex issues under pressure
- Zero-downtime migration experience
- Strong technical communication skills, internal and external
Desirable Skills
- Packet capture and analysis
- Syslog analysis
- Corvil latency analysis tools
JOBID: 12419