Principal Network Systems Engineer

Providius•Hamilton, ON

12h•Onsite

About The Position

Providius is seeking a deeply hands-on Principal Network Systems Engineer to serve as a trusted technical authority on real-world network behavior, device communication, system configuration, and complex failure modes. The ideal candidate will possess a thorough understanding of how devices communicate across a network, how networked systems are configured and operated in practice, potential issues, evidence to look for, and methods for diagnosing and reproducing difficult technical problems. This role involves building representative network environments, characterizing system behavior, reproducing faults, identifying technical signals, and collaborating with engineering teams to ensure products are grounded in real-world network behavior. This is an individual contributor role focused on hands-on work with network equipment, traffic, packet captures, telemetry, configurations, and technical challenges, rather than people management, traditional enterprise IT, or primarily architectural responsibilities. The position involves close collaboration with engineering, product leadership, and customer-facing teams. A significant aspect of the role includes building and operating practical test environments that mirror customer and industry deployments of networked systems. Responsibilities include defining representative configurations, operational scenarios, failure conditions, and technical validation requirements. The engineer will configure systems, induce controlled faults, analyze packet and telemetry behavior, document findings, and assist teams in understanding the technical realities of the systems they develop. The role requires acting as a senior individual contributor and technical authority, advising the VP of Engineering, product management, and engineering teams, without direct ownership of the product roadmap or team management. The candidate should be curious, practical, technically confident, and adept at moving between hands-on troubleshooting, system design, testing, documentation, and technical guidance.

Requirements

7+ years of hands-on experience in network engineering, network systems engineering, systems integration, network validation, network performance, field engineering, escalation engineering, or a closely related technical role.
Deep practical understanding of switching, routing, VLANs, multicast, QoS, traffic flows, packet behaviour, and network troubleshooting.
Strong hands-on experience configuring, operating, and diagnosing switches, endpoints, networked devices, and supporting infrastructure.
Demonstrated ability to investigate difficult network and system problems using packet captures, telemetry, logs, configurations, flow data, monitoring tools, and direct testing.
Experience building, maintaining, or troubleshooting lab, test, validation, integration, staging, customer, or field environments.
Strong understanding of how device behaviour, configuration, firmware, timing, traffic patterns, and network state affect system operation.
Ability to reproduce technical problems and create controlled test scenarios.
Ability to distinguish symptoms, evidence, root causes, contributing conditions, and remediation steps.
Ability to characterize expected system behaviour, operational changes, failure conditions, and edge cases.
Ability to translate real-world system behaviour into clear scenarios, observations, test conditions, and validation requirements.
Strong practical judgment and the ability to distinguish between what is theoretically possible, what is observable, what is reproducible, and what is useful.
Ability to work independently, organize ambiguity, ask strong technical questions, and maintain forward progress without a fully defined roadmap.
Confidence acting as a technical authority and clearly communicating recommendations to engineers, product managers, and company leadership.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Comfortable working closely with software engineering, data, product, and customer-facing teams.
Strong interest in hands-on technical investigation and a willingness to remain directly involved with equipment, configurations, testing, and troubleshooting.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with advanced analytics, data science, or machine learning teams.
Experience defining technical datasets, test scenarios, validation criteria, telemetry schemas, or structured system observations.
Ability to use Python, APIs, scripting, automation, notebooks, SQL, or data-processing tools.
Experience transforming, inspecting, or validating technical data.
Experience working with both on-premise and cloud-connected systems.
Experience with network automation or configuration management.
Experience working in a smaller company, early-stage product environment, or situation where requirements are still being defined.
Ability to contribute to product discussions and identify technically valuable customer use cases.
Experience presenting technical findings to leadership, customers, or cross-functional teams.
Familiarity with agile delivery, product discovery, or backlog development.

Responsibilities

Build, configure, and maintain representative networked lab and test environments for product development, technical investigation, validation, and demonstration.
Configure and troubleshoot switches, routers, endpoints, VLANs, multicast, QoS, routing, timing systems, traffic flows, and other relevant networked systems.
Reproduce realistic operational scenarios, including configuration changes, device replacement, packet loss, timing faults, multicast issues, unexpected traffic patterns, congestion, misrouting, firmware differences, degraded performance, and device failures.
Identify how different devices and systems behave during normal operation, failure, recovery, failover, reconfiguration, and other operational changes.
Capture and interpret packets, flow data, device telemetry, logs, configurations, monitoring data, timing information, and other technical signals.
Determine which technical signals are meaningful for identifying, reproducing, and explaining system behaviour.
Maintain structured documentation of system behaviours, recurring issues, configurations, test scenarios, observable evidence, likely causes, and technical findings.
Define realistic test conditions, expected outcomes, validation criteria, and representative operational scenarios.
Work closely with software, data, and engineering teams to ensure technical environments, test scenarios, and system observations are accurate, representative, and usable.
Review technical findings and system outputs to determine whether they are consistent with real-world network behaviour.
Design representative lab topologies based on how customers and industries actually deploy and operate networked systems.
Identify technical assumptions, edge cases, data limitations, blind spots, and failure modes early.
Provide technical guidance and recommendations to engineering, product management, and company leadership.
Participate in selected customer discovery, technical demonstrations, pilots, and field validation where deep network expertise is required.
Clearly document environments, configurations, scenarios, test conditions, observations, telemetry sources, expected behaviour, and findings.
Support the development of technical requirements by explaining what is technically possible, measurable, reproducible, and useful.
Use scripting, APIs, automation, or data-processing tools where useful, while working closely with other technical staff for more advanced implementation.