Principal Network Engineer

Blink Health•Pittsburgh, PA

14h

About The Position

Blink Health is seeking a Principal Network Engineer to set the technical direction for network and connectivity strategy across offices and cloud environments. The role owns the architecture of routing, switching, VPN, firewall, and cloud networking infrastructure and serves as the senior authority on network design, security, and resilience. It is a hands-on, high-influence position focused on designing for scale, solving complex problems, and developing engineering expertise across the organization. The engineer will define and own the network architecture and multi-year roadmap across on-premises environments and AWS, including Meraki, Palo Alto, AWS VPC, and AWS Transit Gateway. They will partner with engineering, security, and platform teams on network design in AWS and Kubernetes-based microservices environments, establish security and reliability standards, and lead automation, observability, incident response, and major network initiatives. The role also includes mentoring staff, maintaining technical documentation, communicating with stakeholders and leadership, and participating in an on-call rotation.

Requirements

10+ years of experience designing and operating enterprise network environments, including hybrid on-premises and cloud environments.
Proven experience architecting and leading large-scale network initiatives in AWS and Kubernetes-based microservices environments.
Expert-level knowledge of IPSec/VPN, DNS, SNMP, OSPF, BGP, AWS VPC, Security Groups, peering, Transit Gateway, and advanced routing.
Deep understanding of how cloud, container, and virtualization technologies affect network performance, security, and design.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code and network automation, such as Terraform, Python, and Ansible.
Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, set standards, and drive cross-functional alignment.
Experience designing for compliance-sensitive environments such as HIPAA, SOC 2, or PCI.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate technical tradeoffs for leadership.
Comfort working in the Eastern Time Zone.
Ability to travel up to 10% to office sites.
Ability to work up to four days a week in the NYC, St. Louis, or Pittsburgh office.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Palo Alto Networks products, including Panorama and GlobalProtect, and Cisco Meraki at scale.
Experience with service mesh, CNI, or Kubernetes networking internals.
Relevant certifications, such as AWS Advanced Networking Specialty, PCNSE, or CCNP/CCIE.

Responsibilities

Define and own Blink’s network architecture and multi-year roadmap across on-premises and AWS environments, including Meraki, Palo Alto, AWS VPC, and AWS Transit Gateway.
Serve as the senior technical authority for network design in AWS and Kubernetes-based microservices environments, partnering with engineering, security, and platform teams on high-impact decisions.
Drive network-as-code and automation using infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and configuration management.
Establish and promote network design standards and guardrails for security, compliance, redundancy, and high availability.
Lead evaluation, selection, and adoption of products and solutions; develop business cases and present recommendations to IT and engineering leadership.
Lead architecture for complex initiatives, including new site build-outs, cloud migrations, network segmentation, zero trust, and M&A integration.
Serve as the final technical escalation point for critical incidents, lead root cause analysis, and drive systemic fixes.
Partner with security to define hardening and patching standards and investigate and remediate security incidents with network impact.
Design network observability and monitoring strategies for health, performance, and capacity planning.
Mentor and develop network, systems, and service desk staff, and build scalable runbooks and training.
Own technical documentation and architecture decision records for critical systems.
Communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including providing executive-level updates on risk, incidents, and major changes.
Participate in the on-call rotation as a senior escalation resource.