Principal Network Engineer

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Physical Networking organization builds and operates the global network infrastructure supporting OCI workloads, managing thousands of devices across more than 50 regions. Join the team responsible for network fabrics supporting OCI Dedicated Regions and Multicloud Connectivity. As a hands-on Principal Network Engineer, you’ll serve as a technical lead for a key area of the team’s work. You’ll work with customers to understand network requirements, lead designs and standards, and improve how networks are deployed and operated. You’ll independently drive complex initiatives while influencing team direction and partnering on work that spans teams and organizations. 

The successful candidate will combine deep networking expertise with automation, disciplined change execution, and sound technical judgment. You will collaborate with network automation, virtual networking, compute, hardware, security, monitoring, region deployment, and operations teams to deliver reliable, secure, and repeatable deployments for our customers. You’ll help peers resolve difficult technical problems, make design tradeoffs clear, and raise the quality of engineering across the team. 

What you'll do
 

• Lead the architecture, design, and operation of data-center fabrics, routing, and secure connectivity supporting OCI’s physical network infrastructure. 

• Translate customer and product requirements into scalable network designs, configuration standards, and deployment strategies; guide technical decisions and tradeoffs for your area. 

• Independently drive complex projects from technical design through validation, deployment, documentation, and operational handoff, coordinating milestones and dependencies across teams. 

• Set direction for network automation and validation in your area; build or guide the development of tools using Python, APIs, Git workflows, and infrastructure-as-code practices. 

• Establish and improve production-change practices, including risk assessment, pre-change checks, post-change verification, and rollback procedures. 

• Lead improvements to monitoring, capacity planning, runbooks, and incident response; resolve difficult issues spanning protocols, devices, optics, and automation. 

• Participate in a periodic on-call rotation; provide technical leadership during large-scale network incidents and drive lasting corrective actions. 

• Lead design reviews, develop repeatable standards and reference patterns, and mentor engineers through technical guidance, reviews, and knowledge sharing. 

• Represent the team in cross-team and cross-organization initiatives, influencing designs and plans that affect physical network reliability, security, and deployment at scale. 

Required qualifications

• At least 10 years of relevant network engineering experience, including demonstrated experience leading cross-team technical initiatives, influencing design and delivery decisions, and mentoring engineers. 

• Deep understanding of Layer 2 through Layer 4 networking, IP addressing and subnetting, BGP, OSPF, IPv4, IPv6, TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, NAT, ECMP, and high-availability design. 

• Experience leading the design, deployment, or operation of data-center, cloud, service-provider, or large-enterprise networks. 

• Hands-on experience automating network provisioning, configuration, validation, or operations using Python or another programming language. 

• Experience shaping engineering practices using Git, APIs, CI/CD workflows, automated testing, configuration modeling, or infrastructure-as-code. 

• Experience leading production network changes with appropriate risk assessment, validation, rollback, and change-management controls. 

• Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex issues across network protocols, devices, automation systems, and physical infrastructure, and to guide others through resolution. 

• Experience leading incident response, root-cause analysis, operational readiness, and improvements that prevent recurring issues. 

• Ability to independently drive complex technical work, manage dependencies, and influence decisions across engineering and operations teams. 

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear technical designs, explain tradeoffs, and build alignment among stakeholders. 

Preferred qualifications

• Two or more years of experience serving as a technical lead for one or more network engineering areas, with responsibility for design direction, technical decisions, and delivery. 

• Experience building or operating hyperscale cloud, service-provider, ISP, or large-scale data-center networks. 

• Experience partnering with cloud networking and platform teams to integrate virtual network services with physical underlay infrastructure. 

• Experience designing Clos or spine-leaf fabrics, EVPN/VXLAN, SDN overlays, traffic engineering, segmentation, and secure service connectivity. 

• Experience with Terraform, Ansible, YANG, OpenConfig, NETCONF, gNMI, or comparable model-driven networking technologies. 

• Experience defining network telemetry and observability practices using SNMP, streaming telemetry, NetFlow/IPFIX, flow logs, dashboards, alerting, and service-level indicators. 

• Knowledge of network-security principles, including ACL and routing-policy management, least privilege, segmentation, MACsec, IPsec, and TLS. 

• Experience with commodity Ethernet platforms, optics, structured cabling, hardware qualification, and network operating-system validation. 

• Experience establishing reusable deployment patterns, automated validation, operational guardrails, or configuration-drift detection across teams. 

• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools to improve automation, testing, troubleshooting, documentation, or operational efficiency.