Principal Network Engineer

Oracle•Santa Clara, CA

8d•$114,600 - $234,600

About The Position

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Physical Networking organization builds and operates the global network infrastructure supporting OCI workloads, managing thousands of devices across more than 50 regions. The Principal Network Engineer joins the team responsible for network fabrics supporting OCI Dedicated Regions and Multicloud Connectivity, serving as a hands-on technical lead for a key area of the team’s work. The role works with customers to understand network requirements, leads designs and standards, and improves network deployment and operation. The engineer independently drives complex initiatives, influences team direction, and partners across teams and organizations. The position requires deep networking expertise, automation skills, disciplined change execution, and sound technical judgment. The engineer collaborates with network automation, virtual networking, compute, hardware, security, monitoring, region deployment, and operations teams to deliver reliable, secure, and repeatable customer deployments. The role also helps peers resolve difficult technical problems, clarifies design tradeoffs, and raises engineering quality across the team.

Requirements

At least 10 years of relevant network engineering experience, including demonstrated experience leading cross-team technical initiatives, influencing design and delivery decisions, and mentoring engineers.
Deep understanding of Layer 2 through Layer 4 networking, IP addressing and subnetting, BGP, OSPF, IPv4, IPv6, TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, NAT, ECMP, and high-availability design.
Experience leading the design, deployment, or operation of data-center, cloud, service-provider, or large-enterprise networks.
Hands-on experience automating network provisioning, configuration, validation, or operations using Python or another programming language.
Experience shaping engineering practices using Git, APIs, CI/CD workflows, automated testing, configuration modeling, or infrastructure-as-code.
Experience leading production network changes with appropriate risk assessment, validation, rollback, and change-management controls.
Ability to diagnose complex issues across network protocols, devices, automation systems, and physical infrastructure, and guide others through resolution.
Experience leading incident response, root-cause analysis, operational readiness, and improvements that prevent recurring issues.
Ability to independently drive complex technical work, manage dependencies, and influence decisions across engineering and operations teams.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including producing clear technical designs, explaining tradeoffs, and building alignment among stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Two or more years of experience serving as a technical lead for one or more network engineering areas, with responsibility for design direction, technical decisions, and delivery.
Experience building or operating hyperscale cloud, service-provider, ISP, or large-scale data-center networks.
Experience partnering with cloud networking and platform teams to integrate virtual network services with physical underlay infrastructure.
Experience designing Clos or spine-leaf fabrics, EVPN/VXLAN, SDN overlays, traffic engineering, segmentation, and secure service connectivity.
Experience with Terraform, Ansible, YANG, OpenConfig, NETCONF, gNMI, or comparable model-driven networking technologies.
Experience defining network telemetry and observability practices using SNMP, streaming telemetry, NetFlow/IPFIX, flow logs, dashboards, alerting, and service-level indicators.
Knowledge of network-security principles, including ACL and routing-policy management, least privilege, segmentation, MACsec, IPsec, and TLS.
Experience with commodity Ethernet platforms, optics, structured cabling, hardware qualification, and network operating-system validation.
Experience establishing reusable deployment patterns, automated validation, operational guardrails, or configuration-drift detection across teams.
Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools to improve automation, testing, troubleshooting, documentation, or operational efficiency.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture, design, and operation of data-center fabrics, routing, and secure connectivity supporting OCI’s physical network infrastructure.
Translate customer and product requirements into scalable network designs, configuration standards, and deployment strategies; guide technical decisions and tradeoffs.
Drive complex projects from technical design through validation, deployment, documentation, and operational handoff, coordinating milestones and dependencies across teams.
Set direction for network automation and validation; build or guide tools using Python, APIs, Git workflows, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
Establish and improve production-change practices, including risk assessment, pre-change checks, post-change verification, and rollback procedures.
Lead improvements to monitoring, capacity planning, runbooks, and incident response; resolve difficult issues spanning protocols, devices, optics, and automation.
Participate in a periodic on-call rotation, provide technical leadership during large-scale network incidents, and drive lasting corrective actions.
Lead design reviews, develop repeatable standards and reference patterns, and mentor engineers through technical guidance, reviews, and knowledge sharing.
Represent the team in cross-team and cross-organization initiatives, influencing designs and plans affecting physical network reliability, security, and deployment at scale.