Senior Network Engineer - Carrier / Service Provider Backbone (Juniper)

FDC Servers (AS30058) | Fully remote (Europe / North America) | Senior (L3) | Independent contractor

About FDC Servers

FDC Servers (AS30058) is a global dedicated server, colocation, and IP transit provider operating our own international backbone across 27+ points of presence in North America, Europe, APAC, and LATAM, with over 100 Tbps of installed external network capacity. We run a true service-provider network: carrier peering, IP transit, DDoS mitigation, and high-throughput hosting infrastructure. We are expanding our network engineering team.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Network Engineer with a genuine carrier / service provider background. You have spent years hands-on inside a Tier 1 or Tier 2 carrier, IP transit provider, or large ISP backbone, working on Juniper at scale.

This is not an enterprise networking role. If your experience is primarily corporate campus, office LAN/WAN, SD-WAN, or enterprise data center, this position is not a fit. We need engineers who have lived in a live SP production environment: full BGP tables, carrier peering, IX fabrics, MPLS/SR backbones, and maintenance windows where a mistake has real blast radius.

You will act as the L3 authority on our global backbone, owning complex routing escalations, architecture decisions, capacity planning, and mentoring our Tier 2 team, working alongside our existing US/EU engineers. This role is fully remote and open to candidates based in Europe or North America.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the ultimate L3 escalation point for complex routing, switching, and backbone infrastructure incidents across a global carrier-grade network.
• Configure, maintain, and optimize core/aggregation/edge Juniper (QFX, PTX) routers and switches, with occasional support for Cisco platforms (IOS-XR, NX-OS).
• Architect, manage, and troubleshoot ISIS, BGP, IP/MPLS, SR-MPLS, SRv6, routing policy, and scalability at carrier scale.
• Manage transit, peering, and IX relationships at the technical level: BGP policy, communities, traffic engineering, and inbound/outbound path optimization across multiple Tier 1 carriers.
• Lead mitigation during severe network anomalies and DDoS events using BGP Flowspec, RTBH, and traffic scrubbing workflows.
• Drive capacity planning, redundancy reviews, circuit turn-ups, backbone migrations, and major Junos software upgrades.
• Validate and peer-review complex network change scripts (Juniper set-style) prior to implementation in maintenance windows.
• Mentor Tier 2 network engineers, establishing troubleshooting procedures and clear escalation boundaries.

Required Experience (Non-Negotiable)

• Prior employment with a Tier 1 / Tier 2 carrier, IP transit provider, ISP, or large-scale hosting/data center network operator. Enterprise-only backgrounds will not be considered.
• Expert-level hands-on Juniper Junos experience in a live SP production environment (QFX/PTX class hardware).
• Deep operational command of Service Provider protocols: ISIS, BGP (full tables, peering, transit policy), IP/MPLS, SR-MPLS, SRv6, EVPN.
• Practical experience with BGP Flowspec, L3VPN/L2VPN, anycast gateways, and traffic engineering on a production backbone.
• Experience evaluating SP-grade hardware limitations: line-card vs. ASIC/SoC architectures, FIB scale, and platform selection.
• Advanced Layer 2/3 troubleshooting: packet capture analysis, deep route table analysis, log parsing under pressure.
• Strong risk-assessment mindset: you understand blast radius and customer impact before touching a production router.
• Professional written and spoken English for documentation, post-mortems, and mentoring.

Preferred

• JNCIP-SP or JNCIE-SP certification (or demonstrably equivalent experience).
• Network automation: Ansible, NetBox API, Python, Git.
• Cisco IOS-XR / NX-OS experience in SP or spine-and-leaf environments.
• Experience directing remote hands teams for complex deployments, fiber rollouts, and infrastructure audits.

Ideal Candidate

You came up through carrier NOCs and backbone engineering teams, not corporate IT. You take absolute ownership of network health, thrive in high-stakes maintenance windows, and can move between hands-on Junos work and architectural oversight without dropping either. You will be a reliable anchor for our Tier 2 team and a senior technical presence on our global backbone.

Engagement

• Fully remote, long-term independent contractor engagement.
• Pay by agreement, based on experience.

Note to recruiting and staffing agencies: please do not contact us regarding this posting. We work with direct candidates only.