Principal Network Engineer - Reliability

In this role, you will help shape the reliability strategy for critical network services at enterprise scale. You will influence how network reliability is measured, engineered, automated, and continuously improved while partnering across infrastructure, cloud, security, application, architecture, and business teams. This is an opportunity to drive modernization, reduce operational risk, and improve the stability of services that support critical business operations.

Employment Type: Full time
Role Type: Individual contributor; this is not a people-manager role.
Work Model: Hybrid work model with three days per week in the office.
Eligible Locations: Dallas, TX metro; Charlotte, NC metro; or Chandler, AZ metro.
Escalation Expectations: Provides senior technical escalation for critical incidents and high-risk changes. This role is expected to support critical incident response as needed; any recurring on-call rotation will be clearly defined before offer acceptance.
Travel Expectations: 5% or less.

Core Technology Stack

This role is network-centric, with primary focus on routing and switching technologies, data center fabrics, WAN and campus networking, cloud and hybrid connectivity, load balancing, DNS, NTP, firewalls, automation, telemetry, monitoring, and observability tooling.

Responsibilities

• Provide senior technical leadership, hands-on engineering guidance, and cross-functional influence across network reliability strategy, incident leadership, architecture, automation, and operational excellence.
• Network Reliability Strategy: Define and drive reliability targets, SLOs/SLIs, risk measures, service health indicators, and improvement plans for critical network services.
• Incident Leadership: Lead major incident response and service restoration, and drive root cause analysis, corrective action planning, and prevention of repeat incidents.
• Architecture Influence: Review, challenge, and guide network designs to improve resiliency, scalability, security, capacity, failure isolation, and operational simplicity.
• Automation and Observability: Expand telemetry, alerting, service health reporting, configuration management, automated validation, and self-service capabilities to reduce manual toil.
• Operational Excellence: Strengthen standards, runbooks, documentation, change quality, failure readiness, compliance-aligned practices, and production readiness reviews.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with network, cloud, security, infrastructure, application, architecture, and vendor teams while mentoring engineers and communicating complex technical issues clearly to senior stakeholders.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in network engineering, reliability engineering, or network operations supporting business-critical enterprise network services.
• 5+ years of expert knowledge of routing, switching, TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, high-availability design, and related network services including load balancing, DNS, NTP, firewalls, and network security.
• 5+ years of proven ability to lead complex incident response, guide troubleshooting, restore service, and communicate clearly under pressure.
• 5+ years of practical experience applying SRE or reliability engineering practices, including SLOs/SLIs, problem management, service health measurement, operational health metrics, and continuous improvement.
• 5+ years experience improving operational stability and reducing repeat incidents through root cause analysis, post-incident reviews, corrective action planning, systemic remediation, and measurable recurrence prevention.
• 5+ years experience owning corrective actions from post-incident review through implementation, validation, and closure.
• 5+ years experience improving change success rates through risk assessment, peer review, validation testing, rollback planning, and post-change verification.
• 5+ years experience conducting operational readiness reviews, production readiness assessments, failure-mode reviews, or service acceptance reviews.
• 5+ years experience managing vendor escalations, product defects, support cases, and platform lifecycle risks that impact service stability.
• 5+ years experience with capacity planning, performance analysis, traffic engineering, and resiliency planning for large-scale enterprise networks.
• 5+ years of hands-on automation or scripting experience with tools such as Python, PowerShell, Bash, Ansible, Terraform, or equivalent technologies.
• 5+ years of experience improving monitoring, telemetry, alerting, dashboards, metrics, service health reporting, or performance visibility for critical infrastructure services.

Qualifications

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience influencing enterprise network architecture and aligning designs with infrastructure, cloud, security, compliance, and architecture standards.
• Strong technical leadership, collaboration, mentoring, written communication, verbal communication, and stakeholder influence skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to senior stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Relevant networking, cloud, reliability, or IT service management certifications, such as CCNP/CCIE, Juniper, Arista, AWS/Azure networking, ITIL, or equivalent credentials.
• Ability to prioritize reliability improvements based on business impact, operational risk, service criticality, and incident trends.
• Experience contributing to technical strategy, engineering standards, reusable design patterns, or network reliability innovation.
• Experience with network modernization, data center migration, SDN, cloud networking, or reliability transformation initiatives.
• Experience in regulated or critical industries such as financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, or similar environments.
• Master's degree in Telecommunications, Network Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience reading and interpreting packet captures to diagnose network performance, connectivity, protocol, and application-impacting issues.

Indicators of Success

• Improved availability, stability, MTTD, MTTR, change success rate, and incident trends for network services.
• Fewer repeat incidents through stronger root cause analysis, corrective action tracking, and systemic prevention.
• Broader adoption of reliability standards, runbooks, design patterns, operational playbooks, and production readiness practices.
• Reduced manual operational toil through practical automation, improved validation, and clearer service health visibility.
• Stronger confidence from engineering, application, business, and leadership stakeholders in network stability, resilience, and change readiness.

Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Network Engineering, or related field required. This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.