Principal Network Engineer

Oracle•Nashville, TN

21h

About The Position

The Principal Network Engineer will join Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Frontend Fabric Engineering Design team, which designs and develops the global frontend network fabric supporting reliable, scalable cloud services. The team defines network architectures, routing and connectivity solutions, and platform standards for infrastructure growth, working with vendors and internal engineering teams to turn service requirements into validated designs that meet performance, resiliency, security, and deployment standards. The role designs and evolves network solutions; develops automation frameworks and reusable tools for deployment, testing, and operations; and creates validation strategies for hardware, firmware, and configuration changes. It also develops telemetry, network health monitoring, and anomaly detection systems; leads incident investigations and root-cause analysis; and translates findings into lasting design improvements. The engineer contributes to performance optimization, capacity planning, delivery of technical milestones, customer engagements, and mentoring. The position leads network architecture and implementation across data center, cloud, and inter-cloud environments. It engineers security controls and compliance guardrails; develops infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, validation, and drift-detection capabilities; and establishes monitoring, telemetry, service-level objectives, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks. The engineer collaborates with SRE, platform, security, and other teams on reviews, incidents, changes, capacity planning, and service onboarding; maintains technical documentation and standards; mentors junior engineers; and participates in candidate interviews and hiring recommendations.

Responsibilities

Lead designs for routing policies, data center network architectures, EVPN/VXLAN fabrics, and SDN overlays spanning on-premises and cloud environments.
Define high-availability, ECMP, and traffic-engineering patterns, validating them through lab or sandbox testing, failure modeling, and staged rollouts.
Author design documents and lead reviews with related teams; reduce change risk through method-of-procedure, rollback, and verification plans.
Implement and operate cloud network topologies, including VPC/VNet, subnets, routing tables, NAT, Transit/Hub-and-Spoke, PrivateLink or service endpoints, and inter-cloud connectivity.
Establish consistent network policies and connectivity across environments using standard blueprints and golden configurations.
Engineer network segmentation, access-control policies, and encryption integrations aligned with zero-trust principles.
Embed compliance controls for change management, least-privilege access, and evidence collection; partner with security and GRC teams on audits.
Review rulebases and routing policies, eliminating duplicate or shadow rules and reducing attack surface.
Develop reusable Terraform modules and Ansible playbooks, and enforce code review, linting, policy-as-code, and pipeline test gates.
Build API- and scripting-based validation and drift-detection tools, integrating automated rollbacks and canary changes.
Promote GitOps practices, configuration data modeling, and a source of truth for inventory.
Implement SNMP and streaming telemetry, NetFlow/IPFIX, and flow logs for network health, capacity, and security analytics.
Define availability, latency, loss, and jitter SLIs/SLOs; build dashboards, alerts, and runbooks; and lead capacity and performance reviews and right-sizing.
Correlate telemetry with incidents, lead problem management, and reduce recurring issues.
Partner with SRE, platform, and security teams on architecture reviews, incident response, post-incident remediation, and capacity planning.
Lead portions of on-call response and complex change events, coordinating with related teams to minimize risk and downtime.
Contribute to cross-LOB standards, reference architectures, and service onboarding patterns.
Create and maintain design documents, network diagrams, runbooks, and inventories, ensuring traceability to requirements and controls.
Facilitate and participate in design and change reviews, document decisions and lessons learned, and evolve patterns and modules.
Mentor junior engineers through code and document reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing.
Manage and coordinate moderately complex tasks, monitor timelines and deliverables, and ensure projects or initiatives meet requirements and deadlines.
Delegate, monitor, and prioritize work across projects, provide technical oversight, and adjust plans as resources or timelines change.
Collaborate across the organization and with business leaders, stakeholders, and customers to align expectations and deliver suitable solutions.
Seek and consider diverse perspectives, supporting an inclusive environment where others feel heard and respected.
Analyze information to address moderately complex issues, escalate unresolved or critical issues with assessments and proposed solutions, and document problem-solving strategies.
Pursue learning and feedback, stay current with industry trends and best practices, and coach junior team members.
Recommend and help implement process improvements, evaluate their impact, and solicit feedback on alternative approaches.
Participate in candidate interviews, assess candidates, and provide hiring recommendations.