Senior Principal Engineer, Network Software

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, enabling innovations through connectivity. The Senior Principal Engineer will drive innovative architectures in network technology, collaborating with stakeholders and providing technical leadership to evolve Equinix's global network infrastructure.

Responsibilities:

• Provide senior thought leadership and significant technical contributions to help develop target software defined network architectures and recommendations, for the evolution of the network technology stack at Equinix, in close collaboration with stakeholders
• Drive cross-stakeholder alignment on network requirements and design trade-offs
• Help identify technical debt and drive continual improvement by partnering with associate organizations
• Provide in-depth technical expertise to identify and evaluate innovations in networking and assess their impact on the network infrastructure of future at Equinix
• Contribute to next-generation networking proof-of-concept projects to deliver tangible outcomes that guide new technology investments and implementation decisions to evolve the network technology stack
• Serve as an orchestrator of thinking internally and externally, including in interactions with customers, partners, forums, and open-source/developer communities

Requirements:

• 15+ years of relevant experience
• Demonstrable, extensive experience in developing next generation networking technologies and architectures implemented in large-scale, critically important deployments. Examples include: a proven background in network infrastructure design, engineering, DevOps/operations, security, tooling, networking products/solutions
• Top-tier relevant network design or network engineering leadership with software-defined, cloud-native networking technologies and ecosystems is essential with detailed knowledge across layers 2-3 control and network data planes and ideally networking operating systems as well
• Substantive knowledge of network (function) disaggregation, including merchant silicon and ODM solutions
• Expert level knowledge with service provider networking technologies and protocols, including BGP, IS-IS, MPLS, Segment Routing, RSVP, QoS, EVPN, VXLAN, traffic engineering (backbone & edge)
• Passionate about infrastructure automation through software, together with solid hands-on experience of network automation
• Experience of engineering with programming languages (such as C, C++, Go, Python, Rust) for network automation
• Experience with network configuration tools such as Netconf, yang
• Experience with open networking technologies and ecosystems, such as Routing Daemons (FRR, Bird, GoBGP), Linux Networking (eBPF, VPP, XDP), and SONiC, or other Linux-based open Network Operating Systems
• Involvement with modern observability platforms (Prometheus/PromQL, Grafana, gNMI, etc)
• Experience with network flow export (Netflow, IPFIX, sFlow) and analysis
• Solid understanding of full networking stack (routing, switching and optical networking), including key protocols & standards, Linux networking and open-source solutions, vendor ecosystems and implementation best practices
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills, for interacting with both engineers and executive leadership
• Excellent collaboration and people skills
• Experience working on hybrid distributed teams
• Experience recruiting and coaching/mentoring engineers at all levels