We’ve been proudly serving Australian communities since 1914 and have grown to become a top 30-listed company on the ASX with a portfolio of iconic homegrown brands. At the heart of our continued success is over 115,000 team members working across the country, all contributing to bringing our customers smiles. You’ll not only get to see your work make a difference, you’ll be part of a team working together to help Australians eat and live better every day.

Our Technology team is the backbone of the business, building and maintaining the information technology infrastructure that support Coles Group.

As a part of the Technology team, you get the prospect to work through complex, challenging, meaningful problems using large data sets and new technologies to expand your skills and experience.

You’ll join our Infrastructure & Operations function and work within the Core Network Engineering team.

About the role

As a Network Automation Engineer - Core Networks, you’ll combine deep network engineering expertise with software development, Infrastructure-as-Code and DevOps practices to help automate how our core network environment is configured, deployed, validated and operated.

Our team is responsible for the network services that connect a large, complex and distributed technology environment across data centres, support centres, distribution and fulfilment centres, and retail locations.

You’ll work alongside Network Engineering, Cloud, Cyber Security, Infrastructure, Architecture, Service Management and DevOps teams to deliver secure, resilient and scalable network services.

We’re continuing to evolve the way we engineer and operate our networks, with a strong focus on automation, standardisation and reducing manual operational effort.





About you and your skills

You’re an experienced network engineer who has moved beyond traditional network administration and can bring together network engineering and software-driven automation.

You’ll bring strong experience working within large-scale enterprise network environments, along with hands‑on capability building and operating network automation.

As part of this role, you will have the opportunity to design, develop and maintain network automation using Python and Ansible, creating reusable modules, playbooks, templates and engineering workflows.

You’ll automate configuration, provisioning, validation, compliance and Day 2 network operations, while applying Infrastructure-as-Code practices using Ansible, Terraform and network APIs.

You will build automated testing, health checks and rollback controls, develop CI/CD workflows using Azure DevOps Pipelines, and automate network lifecycle activities including configuration changes, backups, software upgrades and drift detection.

Working across technologies such as Cisco ACI/APIC, SDA/Catalyst Center, Nexus, Catalyst, Infoblox DDI, Radware Alteon and Azure networking, you’ll partner with Network, Cloud and DevOps teams to identify high-value automation opportunities and help embed an automation‑first approach with strong security, governance and production controls.





The successful candidate should bring substantial enterprise network engineering experience, together with strong hands‑on network automation capability.

- Ideally 5+ years in large-scale, complex disbursed environment
- Proven experience designing, implementing, maintaining and troubleshooting enterprise routing, switching and LAN/WAN services.
- Strong hands‑on experience with Cisco core networking technologies such as ACI, SDA, APIC, Catalyst Center, ISE, Nexus, Catalyst and routing platforms.
- Demonstrated experience developing and operating network automation using Python and Ansible.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, APIs, Git and CI/CD engineering practices.
- Experience automating network lifecycle activities, configuration changes, validation, compliance and operational workflows.
- Experience with network monitoring and management tools for health/performance monitoring, diagnostics, capacity planning and troubleshooting
- Proven capability defining and maintaining enterprise network services in a large-scale, complex and distributed business environment.
- Experience leading technical initiatives and contributing to technology roadmaps, engineering standards and continuous improvement.
- Experience with Terraform, Netmiko, NAPALM, Nornir, network telemetry, ServiceNow integrations, Docker or Kubernetes would also be advantageous.

Most importantly, you’ll bring an automation mindset and enjoy identifying repetitive engineering work that can be transformed into safe, scalable and reusable solutions.

What’s in it for you?

- Flexible working options: We know that work is only one part of your life, so we ac

📌 Network Engineer (Melbourne)
🏢 The Coles Group
📍 Melbourne