Our client, a large systems integrator, is looking to hire a Senior Network Consultant for a 3 to 6 month remote contract. The consultant will be expected to have hands-on expertise in VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (AVI Networks) to design, deploy, and operate enterprise-scale application delivery and load balancing services. The successful candidate will be the subject-matter expert for our load balancing platform, partnering with application, security, cloud, and infrastructure teams to ensure highly available, secure, and performant delivery of business-critical applications across data center and multi-cloud environments.
This role is ideal for a consultant who has spent significant time in production load balancing environments, understands traffic flow at L4–L7 in detail, and can translate complex application requirements into reliable load balancing designs. Candidates with prior F5 BIG-IP experience would be recommended, as the role includes ongoing migration work from legacy F5 platforms to VMware AVI.
Responsibilities:
- VMware Knowledge working in a legacy or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment
- Design or deploy and maintain VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (AVI) controllers, Service Engines, and virtual services across on-premises and cloud environments.
- Ability to understand L4–L7 load balancing solutions including SSL/TLS offload, persistence, content switching, HTTP/2, WAF policies, GSLB, and DNS-based traffic steering.
- Lead customers for migrations from legacy load balancer platforms (e.g., F5 BIG-IP LTM/GTM/ASM) to VMware AVI, including iRule-to-DataScript translation and policy mapping.
- Implement application performance monitoring, analytics, and troubleshooting using AVI’s built-in analytics, logs, and integrations with observability tools (Splunk, Grafana, ELK, etc.).
- Partner with security teams to configure WAF, DDoS protection, certificate lifecycle management, and zero-trust application access.
- Provide escalation support for load balancing incidents; perform root cause analysis and drive permanent resolution.
- Document standards, runbooks, low-level designs, and operational procedures; mentor junior engineers and support on-call rotations.
- Capacity-plan and right-size Service Engine groups; manage upgrades, patching, and lifecycle of AVI controllers.
- Collaborate with cloud, network, and DevOps teams to integrate AVI with VMware NSX-T, Kubernetes (AKO), AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Required Skills:
- Up to 5 years of progressive experience in network engineering with a clear emphasis on application delivery and load balancing.
- 3 years of hands-on production experience with VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (AVI Networks), including controller deployment, Service Engine sizing, virtual service configuration, and troubleshooting.
- Demonstrated, in-depth load balancing experience across L4–L7, including SSL/TLS termination, session persistence, health monitors, HTTP policies, content rewrites, and global server load balancing (GSLB).
- Strong working knowledge of TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, VLANs, VXLAN, NAT, and modern network security concepts.
Desired Skills:
- Hands-on experience with F5 BIG-IP (LTM, GTM/DNS, ASM/Advanced WAF, APM), including iRule development and tmsh administration.
- Experience leading or executing F5-to-AVI (or other) load balancer migration projects at scale.
- Prior experience with additional ADC platforms such as Citrix NetScaler, A10, or HAProxy.
- Experience with Web Application Firewall (WAF) tuning and OWASP Top 10 mitigation.
- Exposure to SRE practices, SLOs/SLIs, and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog).
- Familiarity with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) and API gateways.
We offer excellent benefits and compensation packages.
The expected hourly rate range for this role is: $80-100 per hour.
The posted range is an estimate, the actual compensation offer will be based on the candidate’s experience, skills, qualifications and will be in line with internal equity.