Senior Principal Network Architect

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company, operating 240+ data centers across the globe and providing interconnections to all the key clouds and networks. Businesses need one place to simplify and bring together fragmented, complex infrastructure that spans private and public cloud environments. Our global platform allows customers to place infrastructure wherever they need it and connect it to everything they need to succeed. 

We are a fast-growing global company with 20 years of continuous growth. Through our innovative portfolio of high-performance products and services, we have created the largest, most active global ecosystem of 10,000+ companies, including 2,100 networks and 3,000+ cloud and IT service providers in 32 countries spanning six continents – and counting! 

A leadership role at Equinix means you will drive and collaborate on work that impacts the world. We embrace diversity in thought and contribution and are committed to providing an equitable work environment. that is foundational to our core values as a company and is vital to our success. 

Job Summary 

• Responsible for driving innovative architectures in line with the latest network technology trends, and completeness of architectural changes that meet Product Management and/or Network and Systems Engineering requirements 

• Maintains relationships with senior leadership and collaborates with a broad range of stakeholders globally 

• Establishes key performance metrics 

• Drives a culture of innovation, excellence & collaboration with other business functions 

• Provides strategic direction in planning/execution 

Within Equinix, the Network Platform Engineering (NPE) team is chartered with: 

• Designing, implementing, deploying and operating the company’s global network infrastructure to deliver the best possible performance and experience to customers and internal users 

• Evaluating next-generation networking technologies and developing an evolution roadmap and target architectures for the network technology stack (spanning optical, routing, switching, software networking)  

• Delivering industry thought leadership and building closer engagement with the developer community in areas relevant to networking 

We are looking for a Senior Principal Network Architect to help design, develop and evaluate next-generation networking capabilities and architectures that will help shape the evolution of Equinix's network and infrastructure stack. We are looking for someone with a passion for developing modern, world-class networking solutions that are scalable, reliable, and programmable through software. 

As a Senior Principal Network Architect, you will provide network design and engineering expertise and technical leadership across critical and pivotal initiatives focusing on scaling, modernizing, and automating Equinix’s global network infrastructure. You will have the flexibility to work on different projects to utilize new technologies as we continue to explore new areas and drive innovation across the infrastructure space. It presents a great opportunity for a passionate, technical leader to make a tangible impact to the future-state technology stack of Equinix’ global networks and infrastructure. If you believe in the power of technology to change the world, and if you value creativity, work comfortably in a fast-paced environment and are eager to learn new technologies, we would like to talk to you. 

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 

Qualifications 

• 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