Job Description & Details
If you have spent your career knee-deep in Cisco command lines and want to help modernize a massive data center infrastructure by ripping and replacing it with Arista gear, this 6-month contract is right up your alley. You are essentially coming in as the migration muscle to safely transition a complex enterprise network without dropping production traffic.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will revolve around planning, translating, and executing a major Cisco-to-Arista hardware and software shift. You will be auditing current VLANs, routing policies, and trunking setups on legacy Cisco boxes, translating those configs into Arista EOS, and executing high-stakes cutovers during maintenance windows. The real challenge here isn't just typing out the configs; it is making sure that complex protocols like BGP and OSPF don't flinch during the handoff, and having a bulletproof rollback plan ready if things go sideways.
The Core Tech Stack
You need deep, battle-tested experience with both Cisco switching/routing and Arista hardware running Arista EOS. Because this is a modern data center architecture, fluency in leaf-spine topologies, BGP, OSPF, MLAG, and VXLAN/EVPN is non-negotiable. The hiring team needs someone who doesn't just read network diagrams, but actually understands how to troubleshoot Layer 2 and Layer 3 anomalies on the fly when a cutover hits an unexpected snag.
Interview Expectations
Expect the interviewers to drop you straight into a hypothetical architecture scenario where a BGP peering session fails right in the middle of an Arista migration cutover, and they will want to hear your step-by-step methodology for isolating whether it is a route-map mismatch, an MTU issue, or an underlying MLAG configuration error. They are secretly testing your composure under pressure and your systematic approach to root-cause analysis during high-stress maintenance windows. They will also likely quiz you on subtle EOS command syntax differences compared to IOS to ensure you have actually configured these boxes in production.
Application Advice
Skip the generic IT buzzwords and tailor your resume to heavily emphasize your hands-on data center migration projects, explicitly highlighting your experience moving traffic from Cisco to Arista. Make sure keywords like Arista EOS, VXLAN/EVPN, BGP, OSPF, and change management are front and center so your resume easily clears the ATS filters. If you have automated any of your past network deployments using Python or Ansible, definitely spotlight that as a massive bonus.