Principal Network Engineer
About The Position
Designs, implements, and operates resilient L3/L4 network services across data centers and cloud environments, with influence beyond the immediate team. Leads moderately complex projects, drives automation and observability at scale, contributes to standards and architectures, mentors junior engineers, and collaborates with SRE, platform, and security partners to deliver secure, compliant, highly available network services with measurable impact. The role leads network topology and overlay design; implements and operates cloud networking; engineers security controls and compliance guardrails; develops automation and infrastructure as code; and establishes monitoring, telemetry, and service-level objectives. It also partners across teams on architecture, incident response, capacity planning, and operations, while producing design documentation and standards and mentoring junior engineers. The position manages moderately complex tasks and project work, collaborates across the organization, addresses moderately complex problems, pursues continuous learning and improvement, and contributes to talent development through candidate interviews and hiring recommendations.
Responsibilities
- Lead designs for IP addressing, routing policies (BGP/OSPF/IS-IS), EVPN/VXLAN fabrics, and SDN overlays spanning on-premises and cloud environments.
- Define high availability, ECMP, and traffic-engineering patterns; validate them through lab or sandbox testing, failure modeling, and staged rollouts.
- Author design documents and lead reviews with related teams; reduce change risk through methods of procedure, rollback plans, and verification plans.
- Implement and operate VPC/VNet topologies, subnets, routing tables, NAT, Transit/Hub-and-Spoke connectivity, PrivateLink/service endpoints, and inter-cloud connectivity.
- Design and tune L4/L7 load balancing and service insertion, including proxies and firewalls, to meet SLOs and cost targets.
- Maintain consistent network policy and connectivity across environments using standard blueprints and golden configurations.
- Engineer network segmentation, ACLs and policies, encryption, and DDoS/WAF integrations aligned with zero-trust principles.
- Embed compliance guardrails for change control, least-privilege access, and evidence collection; partner with security and GRC teams to support audits.
- Review rulebases and routing policies, eliminate shadow or duplicate rules, and reduce the attack surface.
- Develop reusable Terraform modules and Ansible playbooks; enforce code reviews, linting, policy as code, and pipeline test gates.
- Build validation and drift-detection tools using APIs and scripting; integrate automated rollbacks and canary changes.
- Promote GitOps practices, configuration data modeling, and an inventory source of truth.
- Implement SNMP and streaming telemetry, NetFlow/IPFIX, and flow logs for health, capacity, and security analytics.
- Define availability, latency, loss, and jitter SLIs/SLOs; build dashboards, alerts, and runbooks; lead capacity and performance reviews and right-sizing actions.
- 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; coordinate with related teams to minimize risk and downtime.
- Contribute to cross-LOB standards, reference architectures, and service onboarding patterns.
- Produce and maintain design documents, network diagrams, runbooks, and inventories, ensuring traceability to requirements and controls.
- Facilitate and participate in design and change reviews, capture decisions and lessons learned, and evolve patterns and modules accordingly.
- Mentor junior engineers through code and document reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing.
- Manage and coordinate moderately complex tasks, timelines, deliverables, and work across multiple projects; delegate, prioritize, provide technical oversight, and adjust plans as resources or timelines change.
- Collaborate across the organization to align expectations and achieve shared objectives; consider stakeholder and customer needs and seek and respect diverse perspectives.
- Analyze a wide range of information to resolve moderately complex issues, escalate unresolved or critical matters with assessments and potential 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, assess their impact on stakeholders, and solicit feedback on alternative approaches.
- Participate in candidate interviews, assess candidates, and provide hiring recommendations.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
- Short-term and long-term disability
- Life insurance and AD&D
- Supplemental life insurance for employees, spouses, and children
- Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
- Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
- 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
- Flexible or accrued paid vacation, depending on employee eligibility and position
- 11 paid holidays
- Paid sick leave
- Paid parental leave
- Adoption assistance
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Financial planning and group legal benefits
- Voluntary auto, homeowner, and pet insurance
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
