Claudia de Luna

Claudia de Luna is a long-time network engineer who starts every project by asking “”What problem are we trying to solve?”” and “”What are the requirements?”” in order to develop standard, repeatable workflows and automation.

That question has run through her entire career. With a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford, she began in network development and sustaining engineering at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she helped direct a next-generation gigabit-speed network backbone, work that earned a NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, alongside hands-on work with the Los Nettos and CalREN regional research networks. From there she moved into infrastructure and telecommunications leadership at Amgen, upgrading its global WAN and developing a global data center strategy, and then into defining network architecture and standards for Barclays Global Investors across 22 global sites, including the engagement model, standards updates, and ITIL-based documentation framework that connected the design and engineering team to operations, not just the network design itself.

As Senior Network Architect for the State of California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, she was responsible for consulting on a statewide network supporting more than 50,000 users across more than 180 institutions and offices, and her work there is a clear example of the pattern she still follows today. She developed router configuration standards, a security hardening framework, and an architecture framework covering policy and standard configuration patterns, so the same problem didn’t have to be solved from scratch at every site.

Over the past several years, as a network architecture and automation consultant, she has carried that same requirements-first approach into modern network automation. She builds practical automation in Python, using Ansible, Netmiko, and Nornir, Streamlit for lightweight front ends, and model-driven tooling. For a Fortune 100 manufacturing client, she was both the network lead and the automation lead on a network segmentation program, building an end-to-end workflow spanning site and device discovery, zone assignment, network-side implementation, and automated testing, closing a gap where incomplete upstream information had routinely stalled migrations. She’s applied the same discipline to hardware refresh projects, where automated before-and-after QA and zero-touch provisioning reduced post-refresh issues enough that client sites could sign off with no outstanding problems. Her platform experience spans Cisco, Arista, and Juniper, Palo Alto and FortiGate firewalls, and Infoblox for DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, but in every case the technology serves the workflow rather than the other way around.

She also trains and mentors other engineers, delivering internal technical training and community training for the Network Automation Forum, and she developed a network automation fundamentals course for EC-Council. She writes about network engineering and automation at gratuitous-arp.net. That same instinct, to ask what problem is actually being solved before getting excited about the technology in front of her, is what keeps her grounded and focused on quality execution.