CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure
№ 18742
CCIE № 18742 · Routing & Switching / Service Provider · CCDE
Martin Clydeford
Principal Network Architect
Twenty-two years designing the quiet machinery beneath everything — carrier backbones, trading floors, and the routes between continents. Networks that converge in milliseconds and fail in silence.
22years in the field
2×CCIE, one number
40+PoPs migrated to SR
180msworst-case convergence
0unplanned outages since 2019
01
Profile
Some engineers chase novelty. Martin chases certainty — the kind you can only earn by carrying a pager through two decades of fibre cuts, route leaks, and change windows that begin at two in the morning. He started in a regional ISP's NOC in 2003 and has since designed national MPLS cores, dual-site trading floors, and a 400-gigabit EVPN fabric that clears a meaningful share of European electronic trading.
His philosophy is unfashionable and effective: the best network is the one nobody notices. Convergence should be measured, not hoped for. Every change should be modelled before it is made. And automation exists to make the network boring — in the way that bridges and aircraft are boring.
He holds CCIE № 18742 in two tracks, the CCDE, and the JNCIE-SP — and he will tell you, unprompted, that the certifications matter far less than the outages that taught him.
02
Experience
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2019 — Present
Principal Network Architect
Meridian Exchange Group · London
Design authority for an ultra-low-latency trading backbone spanning six metro datacentres across London, Frankfurt, and New York.
- Led migration to a 400G EVPN/VXLAN fabric with zero unplanned downtime across 14 change windows.
- Cut worst-case failover convergence from 2.3 s to under 180 ms with BFD and TI-LFA.
- Built an intent-based change pipeline — Python, Nornir, Batfish pre-change validation — now mandatory for every production change.
- Deployed PTP timing distribution to sub-microsecond accuracy for MiFID II compliance.
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2014 — 2019
Lead Network Engineer
Caledonia Telecom · Edinburgh
Core engineering lead for a national carrier serving 1.2 million subscribers.
- Directed the MPLS core refresh and the LDP → Segment Routing migration across 40+ PoPs.
- Designed inter-AS Option C L3VPN interconnects with two neighbouring carriers.
- Mentored a team of nine engineers; three earned CCIE numbers under his guidance.
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2010 — 2014
Senior Network Consultant
Northgate Consulting · Glasgow & London
Multi-vendor design and delivery for FTSE 250 clients — campus, WAN, and datacentre.
- Delivered 30+ engagements across Cisco, Juniper, and F5 estates.
- Authored the firm's reference architecture for resilient dual-provider WAN edge.
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2007 — 2010
Network Engineer
Firthbank Financial Services · Edinburgh
Ran dual-site trading-floor networks; designed the firm's first fully redundant DMVPN branch WAN. Earned CCIE № 18742 in November 2007.
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2003 — 2007
NOC Engineer → Network Engineer
Hebrides Internet · Glasgow
Regional ISP. BGP peering, DSL aggregation, and a formative education in 2 a.m. fibre cuts.
03
Credentials
Held current, every one. The numbers below are the kind an engineer remembers better than birthdays.
CCIE Service Provider
№ 18742
CCDE — Design Expert
№ 2014::21
JNCIE-SP
№ 2890
Advanced Networking — Specialty
ANS-C01
ACE: Design — Level 5
ACE-D5
DevNet Professional
DEVCOR
04
Expertise
Routing at scale
Service provider
Datacentre & low latency
Cloud & hybrid
Automation
Platforms
05
Podium & print
Cisco Live Europe — 2018 & 2022
“Segment Routing in Anger: Lessons from a National Carrier Migration”
NANOG 87 — lightning talk
“Batfish or It Didn't Happen: Pre-change Validation in Production”
RIPE 86
“What 40 PoPs Taught Us About LDP Funerals”
IETF — internet-drafts
Co-author of two drafts on EVPN operational practice. Expired — but he's proud of them.
BEng (Hons) Electronic & Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, 2003. Has mentored 11 engineers to CCIE numbers of their own.
— end of transmission —
The network should be
the least interesting thing
about your business.
If yours is currently fascinating, Martin can help.