Principal Network Engineer

Planet Pharma; Alameda (CA); On-site; USD 158,000 - 179,000; Full time

Job summary

Planet Pharma in Alameda, CA seeks a Principal Engineer – Networking to own the current network and security infrastructure and set new standards. You will lead reliability engineering, automation, and cross-team collaboration to deliver scalable, secure networking solutions.

We expect 12+ years in network administration, strong leadership, and experience with cloud platforms and security governance. A Master’s or Bachelor’s in a related field is preferred, with agile, incident-response

Qualifications

• Master’s or Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field with extensive experience.
• 12+ years in network administration in production environments.
• Leadership and architecture/strategy experience across multiple systems.
• Experience evaluating new platforms and technologies.
• Strong leadership and mentoring experience.
• Familiarity with IT security frameworks and governance models.
• Experience in Agile environments using Jira/JSM.

Responsibilities

• Own reliability engineering for networks with automation-first operations.
• Lead design of automated health checks, telemetry, and alerting.
• Develop and apply network change management with automated validation.
• Mentor engineers on reliability-minded design and incident learning.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams on strategic technology initiatives.
• Oversee documentation, runbooks, and post-change verifications.

Skills

Leadership & mentoring

Agile / Scrum

Incident response

Observability

Automation mindset

Cloud networking

Education

Master’s degree in a relevant field

Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field

Associate degree with 15 years experience

Tools

Python/Go

Bash scripting

Ansible

Terraform

GitHub/GitLab

AWS/Azure

Job description

Target PR Range: 76-86/hr DOE

JOB DESCRIPTION

SUMMARY/JOB PURPOSE (Basic purpose of the job): We are growing and our IT Infrastructure needs to grow and evolve to continue to enable the business. We are looking for a Principal Engineer – Networking to own the existing network and security infrastructure but also have the determination and experience to set the standards in this area in the coming months and years.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

Reliability Engineering

• Designs networks with reliability, recoverability, and graceful degradation as primary engineering goals, not afterthoughts.
• Builds automation-first network operations, including automated validation, remediation, rollback, configuration deployment, and recovery workflows.
• Experience using infrastructure-as-code, configuration-as-code, or network-as-code practices to improve repeatability, auditability, and operational safety.
• Designs and implements automated health checks, synthetic testing, telemetry pipelines, and alerting that detect service-impacting conditions before customers report them.
• Uses observability data, including metrics, logs, traces, flow data, routing state, device telemetry, and packet-level evidence to diagnose reliability issues.
• Understands how to build “non-fragile” networks that become safer over time through testing, learning, automation, and continuous improvement.
• Applies reliability engineering practices to network change management, including pre-change validation, intent verification, staged rollout, canary deployment, automated rollback, and post-change verification.
• Experience designing safeguards that prevent human error from becoming production impact, including policy checks, configuration linting, peer review, and automated compliance validation.
• Experience improving mean time to detect, mean time to mitigate, and mean time to recover for network-related incidents.
• Balances reliability, security, scalability, cost, and operational simplicity when making architecture and engineering decisions.
• Provides technical leadership in establishing network reliability engineering standards, design patterns, automation frameworks, and operational readiness practices.
• Leads efforts to transform reactive network operations into proactive, measurable, and automated reliability engineering practices.
• Mentors engineers on reliability-minded design, operational excellence, incident learning, automation, and safe change practices.
• Identifies systemic reliability risks across complex network environments and drives cross-functional remediation before they result in outages.

Product Strategy & Roadmap (Product-Centric Focus)

• Develop and apply complex and long-term strategies on challenging / new concept companywide projects.
• Works on strategic initiatives with companywide impact.
• Leads in providing business solutions that balance needs, resource requirements, and long-term impact.

Product Development & Delivery (Agile/Product Team Support)

• Leads the successful completion of major initiatives or programs and leads ambiguous projects with high visibility and impact.
• Determine and pursue courses of action necessary to obtain desired results for companywide initiatives.
• Lead the design and delivery of solutions for the most ambiguous, high-risk technical challenges, inventing new approaches or tools.
• Own and refine end-to-end development processes, from ideation through CI/CD, security scanning, and production monitoring.

Stakeholder Management & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Interacts with senior external personnel on significant technical matters with companywide impact.
• Translates overall direction and strategy and communicates across organizational levels and functions.
• Acts as advisor to management and customers on advanced technical research studies and applications.

Operational Excellence, Quality & Compliance

• Own the through documentation of instructions of process for systems and applications, including architecture diagrams, runbooks and code-level commits / READMEs.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for high-impact issues.
• Make decisions regarding access, permissions, and security controls across systems.
• Ensure that completed work delivers long-term value, including the aspects of maintainability, performance and observability.

Subject Matter Expertise

• Represents area in companywide forums
• Sought as an expert in area to solve ambiguous technical challenges
• Provide leadership with insight into future technologies and provide recommendations for implementation

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES: No supervisory responsibilities.

EDUCATION/EXPERIENCE/KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS:

Education:

• Master’s degree in a relevant field and 11 years of experience; or
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field and 13 years of related experience; or
• Associate degree and 15 years of experience; or equivalent combination of education or years of experience

Technical certification may be required

Experience:

• At least 12 years of experience in network administration in a highly available and production environment.
• Proven experience leading architecture and platform strategy across multiple systems
• Demonstrated ability to resolve complex, cross-platform technical issues
• Experience evaluating and implementing new platforms and technologies
• Strong leadership and mentoring experience
• Familiarity with IT security frameworks and governance models
• Experience working in Agile environments and using ticketing systems (e.g., JIRA, JSM)

Knowledge and Skills:

• Technical skills: Palo Alto firewalls, Cisco/Juniper route & switch, System administration (intermediate), Coding (Python/Go), Scripting (Bash), Cloud networking (AWS/Azure), Automation (Ansible/Terraform/Chef), GitHub/GitLab.
• Comprehensive level knowledge of redundant LAN and WAN connectivity.
• Advanced level knowledge migrating the corporate network into the public Cloud; e.g., AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Advanced level knowledge of next-generation firewalls. Intermediate level knowledge of corporate wireless networks.
• Intermediate level knowledge of logging analysis products such as Splunk or Solarwinds. Intermediate level management of Data and Telecom connections and vendors.
• Works under consultative direction toward predetermined long-range goals and objectives. Assignments are often self-initiated.

Understands key business processes and business areas.