Principal Network Engineer

Oracle•Nashville, TN

20d•$114,600 - $234,600

About The Position

The Frontend Fabric Engineering Design team within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) 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, working with vendors and internal engineering teams to turn service requirements into validated designs that meet performance, resiliency, security, and deployment standards. The Principal Network Engineer designs and evolves network solutions; builds automation frameworks and reusable deployment, testing, and operations tools; and develops validation strategies for hardware, firmware, and configuration changes. The role also develops telemetry, network health monitoring, and anomaly detection systems; leads incident investigations and root-cause analysis; and turns findings into lasting design improvements. It includes performance optimization, capacity planning, delivery of technical milestones, customer engagement, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

Lead designs for routing policies (BGP/OSPF/IS-IS), data center network architectures, 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 drive reviews with related teams; reduce change risk with method-of-procedure, rollback, and verification plans.
Implement and operate VPC/VNet topologies, subnets, routing tables, NAT, Transit/Hub-and-Spoke networking (such as TGW/VCN), PrivateLink or service endpoints, and inter-cloud connectivity.
Maintain consistent network policy and connectivity across environments using standard blueprints and golden configurations.
Engineer network segmentation, ACLs and policies, and IPsec/TLS encryption integrations aligned to zero-trust principles.
Embed compliance guardrails for change control, least-privilege access, and evidence collection; partner with security and GRC teams on audits.
Review rulebases and routing policies periodically, removing shadow or duplicate rules and reducing the attack surface.
Develop reusable Terraform modules and Ansible playbooks; enforce code reviews, linting, policy-as-code, and pipeline test gates.
Build API- and scripting-based validation and drift-detection tools; 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 repeat 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.
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; evolve patterns and modules accordingly.
Mentor junior engineers through code and document reviews, pairing, and knowledge-sharing sessions.
Manage and coordinate moderately complex tasks, timelines, and deliverables for moderately sized projects or initiatives; delegate, prioritize, and adjust plans across multiple projects.
Collaborate across the organization and with business leaders, stakeholders, and customers to align expectations and meet needs; seek and listen to diverse perspectives.
Analyze data to identify solutions to moderately complex problems, escalate unresolved or critical issues with assessments and suggested solutions, and document problem-solving strategies.
Pursue learning and feedback, stay informed about 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.