Principal Network Engineer

Oracle•Seattle, WA

1d•$114,600 - $234,600

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, and contributes to standards and architectures. Mentors junior engineers, provides input on team decisions, and collaborates with SRE, platform, and security partners to deliver secure, compliant, highly available network services with measurable team and group 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 SLO practices. It partners across teams on architecture, incidents, remediation, and capacity planning, contributes to standards and documentation, and mentors junior engineers. Core expectations include coordinating moderately complex work, collaborating inclusively, solving problems, pursuing continuous learning and improvement, and participating in candidate interviews and hiring recommendations.

Responsibilities

Lead designs for IP addressing, routing policies (BGP/OSPF/IS-IS), EVPN/VXLAN fabrics, and SDN overlays across on-premises and cloud environments.
Define high-availability, ECMP, and traffic-engineering patterns; validate them through lab testing, failure modeling, and staged rollouts.
Write design documents and lead 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 connectivity, PrivateLink/service endpoints, and inter-cloud connectivity.
Design and tune L4/L7 load balancing and service insertion 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 and partner with security/GRC teams to support audits; periodically review rulebases and routing policies to reduce 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 tooling; integrate automated rollbacks and canary changes.
Champion GitOps practices, configuration data modeling, and an inventory source of truth.
Implement SNMP/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 and drive problem management and reduction of 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; document decisions and lessons learned and evolve patterns and modules.
Mentor junior engineers through code and document reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing.
Coordinate moderately complex tasks, timelines, deliverables, and work across multiple projects; provide technical oversight and adjust plans as resources or timelines change.
Collaborate across the organization to align expectations and achieve shared objectives, considering stakeholder and customer needs and supporting inclusive participation.
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 on industry trends and practices, and coach and mentor 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.