Lead Principal Network Developer

Responsibilities

• Network Design, Development, and Validation
• Oversees the validation of production network and ensures scaling strategies are optimized.
• Influences the network solution and architecture design/validation process, providing industry-leading insights and validation.
• Anticipates and mitigates highly complex, critical risks in network design prior to deployment, developing strategic recommendations that ensure future-proof solutions.
• Designs playbooks for highly complex issues with the widest blast radius related to network areas.
• Led the design and optimization of network processes to drive efficiency.
• Automation and Scripting
• Leads the development and maintenance of the most advanced automation frameworks for testing and operations, driving significant efficiency improvements across the organization.
• Pioneers the automation of critical network tasks, including production and lab environments and drives optimization of repetitive support functions to significantly enhance processes.
• Creates and customizes highly complex dashboards, telemetry systems, and alerting mechanisms, proactively ensuring network health and reliability.
• Develops and enhances the most advanced scripts driving automation of tasks across multiple teams and business units, driving organizational efficiency.
• Architects and scales infrastructure pipelines, configuration items, defining Playbooks and organizing resources.
• Leads cross-functional efforts to extend or evolve tools that enable the scalable launch of new product functionality.
• Testing and Quality Assurance
• Updates and improves existing test cases and the strategic development of new test cases, and comprehensive test strategies, to ensure network integrity across the organization.
• Acts as the foremost technical leader for test practices and strategies, providing industry-leading guidance to develop robust testing protocols.
• Spearheads the implementation of new approaches to improve break-fix validation and post-event root cause analysis (RCA), ensuring resolution of issues and integration of lessons learned across the organization.
• Drives the development of standardized qualification processes across teams (e.g., vendors, product teams, internal network qualification, quality assurance) to validate systems and environments through pre-production testing, and ensure compliance prior to deployment.
• Maintains and evolves expertise in relevant areas by proactively monitoring emerging trends, technologies, and industry standards, ensuring the organization remains current with best practices.
• Mentors others to do the same.
• Maintains and evolves expertise in relevant areas by proactively monitoring emerging trends, technologies, and industry standards, ensuring the organization remains current with best practices.
• Monitoring and Reliability
• Leads the development of new dashboards, telemetry systems, and alerting mechanisms to monitor network health, including defining metrics, trends, and thresholds to ensure service level objectives (SLOs).
• Develops and enhances the most advanced monitoring and alerting systems and the enhancement of the detection and diagnosis of network anomalies.
• Provides technical expertise on critical escalations during incident response.
• Formalizes practices for issue handoff, accountability, and closure, and responds to internal and external stakeholders when needed.
• Pioneers the development and continuous enhancement of innovative tools and solutions for frontline support teams, driving efficiencies in responding to network failure conditions.
• Cross-Team Collaboration and Leadership
• Partners with project/program managers to ensure the achievement of critical test and deployment milestones, aligning projects with overarching organizational strategies.
• Provides expert technical and non-technical mentorship cross-functionally, and industry-leading subject matter expertise to the team, driving technical excellence and innovation across functions.
• Drives high-visibility incident response cases and leads the delivery of root cause analysis (RCA) results, during major technical incidents.
• Collaborates with cross-functional teams to align roadmaps across projects and lead the development of network roadmap, to support strategic objectives.
• Oversees high-level collaboration with vendors and internal teams, ensuring adherence to networking standards, proactively identifying and resolving areas of misalignment to enhance overall network integrity.
• Performance and Capacity Management
• Analyzes network performance and service metrics (e.g., latency, throughput, packet loss) to identify network efficiency issues and designs and architects capacity to meet future demand, working with internal and external stakeholders to gather requirements for anticipated future needs.
• Predicts future network usage patterns and capacity needs to ensure the infrastructure can support anticipated growth, writing design and white papers to make change within organization.

Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading complex, multi-disciplinary projects and teams.
• Experience in designing, developing, and validating network architectures and systems.
• Strong understanding of network protocols, security, and reliability principles.
• Expertise in automation, scripting, and testing methodologies.
• Ability to anticipate and mitigate highly complex, critical risks in network design.
• Experience in creating and customizing highly complex dashboards, telemetry systems, and alerting mechanisms.
• Knowledge of industry-standard tools and technologies used in network engineering.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Ability to work independently and manage multiple projects simultaneously.
• Passion for technology and a commitment to staying current with industry trends and best practices.