The Principal Network Service Engineer serves a key role as a technical leader and advisor for the global Network Operations team.  This role works hand in hand with the department director, regional managers, duty engineers, and other technical teams to ensure Equinix maintains first in class network experience for customers. 

Responsibilities: 

• Lead continuous analysis and optimization of all network infrastructure  

• Develop and maintain high-level and low-level network designs to improve operational efficiency  

• Lead the deployment of scalable network solutions, ensuring performance and security best practices 

• Consult on day-to-day operational issues, maintenances, and incidents 

• Serve as key escalation in incident response, communication, and network service recovery 

• Lead development of tooling and automation for improving efficiency and/or functionality for the team 

• Lead in tuning and improving observability, monitoring, and alerting solutions 

• Advise on planning and execution of network maintenance activities 

• Ensure departmental policies, procedures, runbooks, etc. are operationally adopted 

• Ensure network infrastructure documentation is properly maintained 

• Be a key contributor in developing departmental policies, procedures, and documentation 

• Leverage automation tools such as python, ansible, etc to improve network management efficiency 

• Work closely with cross-functional teams to align network strategies with business needs 

• Provide duty and/or leadership fill in or escalation coverage as needed 

Requirements: 

• Education: College degree in related field and/or equivalent knowledge and work experience. 

• Experience: 10 or more years working on large scale service provider networks and at least 5 in senior role 

• Expert level knowledge and experience in network routing and switching 

• Deep understanding of protocols and applications at all layers of the OSI model 

• Network protocols/technologies: BGP, EVPN, VXLAN, MPLS, ISIS, IPv4/6, MST/PVST, and many others 

• Experience with data center networking principles, including spine-leaf architecture technologies  

• Experience with cloud service providers network topologies, deployments, and concepts 

• Strong understanding of Unix based operating systems 

• Strong programming experience with languages and data models such as: Bash, Python, Perl, JSON, and YAML 

• Network Automation and source of truth experience with Ansible, Jinja, Netbox, GIT and others 

• Ability to be a leader and able to educate more junior engineers on new designs and technical processes 

• Understanding of practices such as ITIL and Continuous Integration 

• Network hardware: Juniper, Arista, Cisco, Nokia and various firewall appliances 

• Strong organization and time management skills 

• Impeccable verbal and written communication skills 

• A strong understanding of customer service 

• Must be self-motivated and disciplined 

 
Preferred Qualifications: 

• Master of Science in Computer Science or related discipline 

• Experience with ticketing systems such as Jira and Service Now 

• Experience with virtualization networks such as Kubernetes and VMware  

• Experience with regulatory compliance standards  

• Experience with DDoS mitigation tooling and deployment 

• Experience with DNS, RPKI, RadB, and IPAM systems 

• Experience with network monitoring SaaS applications such as Kentik, Thousand Eyes, Catchpoint 

• Expert Level vendor certification (CCIE, JNCIE, ACE: L6)