Senior Administrator F5, Infoblox IPAM

Job description

Infoblox SME – L4 Role Overview The Infoblox Subject Matter Expert (SME) – Level 4 serves as the senior technical escalation point and design authority for enterprise DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management (DDI) services. The role owns complex troubleshooting, platform engineering, service resilience, lifecycle planning, and automation for Infoblox environments. Working with network, infrastructure, cloud, security, and service management teams, the SME ensures DDI services are reliable, secure, scalable, and aligned with business requirements. L4 denotes advanced engineering and escalation ownership rather than routine ticket administration. Key Responsibilities • Architecture and engineering: Design and maintain Infoblox NIOS Grid architecture, including Grid Manager, Grid Manager Candidate, member appliances, high availability, site resiliency, and capacity planning. Produce high-level and low-level designs with dependencies, risks, and recovery requirements. • Advanced DNS ownership: Engineer and troubleshoot authoritative and recursive DNS, forward and reverse zones, DNS views, conditional forwarding, delegation, dynamic updates, zone transfers, caching, and integration with Microsoft DNS and Active Directory. • Advanced DHCP ownership: Design and troubleshoot scopes, ranges, reservations, options, relay dependencies, lease allocation, DHCP failover, and dynamic DNS updates across distributed networks. • IPAM governance: Define address allocation standards, network containers, subnet structures, extensible attributes, and reconciliation controls. Identify overlapping networks, stale records, address conflicts, and capacity risks. • L4 incident escalation: Lead technical diagnosis of critical and recurring DDI incidents using logs, packet captures, service statistics, and dependency analysis. Support major incident bridges with clear findings, recovery options, and technical updates. • Problem management: Deliver evidence-based root cause analysis, corrective actions, and preventive improvements. Coordinate product-defect investigations and technical escalations with Infoblox support. • Platform lifecycle: Plan and execute approved NIOS upgrades, patches, appliance replacements, migrations, and configuration changes, including compatibility checks, testing, rollback plans, and post-change validation. • Resilience and recovery: Maintain backup and restore procedures, validate high-availability and disaster recovery arrangements, and support recovery exercises against agreed recovery objectives. • Security and compliance: Apply role-based access, secure administration, audit logging, configuration hardening, and approved DNS security controls. Partner with security teams on vulnerability remediation and access reviews. • Automation and integration: Develop controlled automation using Infoblox WAPI/REST APIs and tools such as Python, PowerShell, or Ansible. Integrate approved provisioning workflows with ITSM, cloud, and infrastructure platforms, including validation, error handling, and auditability. • Monitoring and optimization: Establish actionable alerting and reporting for Grid health, DNS performance, DHCP pool utilization, IPAM capacity, and service availability. Tune configurations based on evidence and service requirements. • Technical enablement: Maintain architecture diagrams, operating procedures, runbooks, knowledge articles, and support handover documentation. Mentor L2/L3 engineers and provide technical guidance during complex changes and escalations. Required Skills and Experience • Extensive hands-on experience supporting enterprise Infoblox NIOS environments, with demonstrated ownership of complex DDI engineering, troubleshooting, and escalations. • Expert-level understanding of DNS, DHCP, and IPAM fundamentals and their dependencies on routing, firewalls, DHCP relays, Active Directory, and application connectivity. • Strong practical experience with Infoblox Grid administration, physical or virtual appliances Key Responsibilities Architecture and engineering: Design and maintain Infoblox NIOS Grid architecture, including Grid Manager, Grid Manager Candidate, member appliances, high availability, site resiliency, and capacity planning. Produce high-level and low-level designs with dependencies, risks, and recovery requirements. • Advanced DNS ownership: Engineer and troubleshoot authoritative and recursive DNS, forward and reverse zones, DNS views, conditional forwarding, delegation, dynamic updates, zone transfers, caching, and integration with Microsoft DNS and Active Directory. • Advanced DHCP ownership: Design and troubleshoot scopes, ranges, reservations, options, relay dependencies, lease allocation, DHCP failover, and dynamic DNS updates across distributed networks. • IPAM governance: Define address allocation standards, network containers, subnet structures, extensible attributes, and reconciliation controls. Identify overlapping networks, stale records, address conflicts, and capacity risks. • L4 incident escalation: Lead technical diagnosis of critical and recurring DDI incidents using logs, packet captures, service statistics, and dependency analysis. Support major incident bridges with clear findings, recovery options, and technical updates. • Problem management: Deliver evidence-based root cause analysis, corrective actions, and preventive improvements. Coordinate product-defect investigations and technical escalations with Infoblox support. • Platform lifecycle: Plan and execute approved NIOS upgrades, patches, appliance replacements, migrations, and configuration changes, including compatibility checks, testing, rollback plans, and post-change validation. • Resilience and recovery: Maintain backup and restore procedures, validate high-availability and disaster recovery arrangements, and support recovery exercises against agreed recovery objectives. • Security and compliance: Apply role-based access, secure administration, audit logging, configuration hardening, and approved DNS security controls. Partner with security teams on vulnerability remediation and access reviews. • Automation and integration: Develop controlled automation using Infoblox WAPI/REST APIs and tools such as Python, PowerShell, or Ansible. Integrate approved provisioning workflows with ITSM, cloud, and infrastructure platforms, including validation, error handling, and auditability. • Monitoring and optimization: Establish actionable alerting and reporting for Grid health, DNS performance, DHCP pool utilization, IPAM capacity, and service availability. Tune configurations based on evidence and service requirements. • Technical enablement: Maintain architecture diagrams, operating procedures, runbooks, knowledge articles, and support handover documentation. Mentor L2/L3 engineers and provide technical guidance during complex changes and escalations. Skill Requirements Extensive hands-on experience supporting enterprise Infoblox NIOS environments, with demonstrated ownership of complex DDI engineering, troubleshooting, and escalations. • Expert-level understanding of DNS, DHCP, and IPAM fundamentals and their dependencies on routing, firewalls, DHCP relays, Active Directory, and application connectivity. • Strong practical experience with Infoblox Grid administration, physical or virtual appliances, high availability, upgrades, backups, recovery, and distributed deployments. • Ability to troubleshoot DNS resolution failures, DHCP allocation issues, replication or synchronization problems, and intermittent service degradation through packet and log analysis. • Working knowledge of TCP/IP, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, subnetting, DNSSEC, and secure DNS administration. • Hands-on experience with Infoblox WAPI/REST APIs and at least one scripting or automation tool, including secure handling of credentials and permissions. • Experience managing migrations from legacy or Microsoft DNS/DHCP platforms, including discovery, dependency mapping, data validation, cut