Principal Network Development Engineer (US Citizenship Required)

Description

About the Team Oracle Cloud advances infrastructure and cloud services through automation, scalability, and security. The IES Federal Network Engineering team supports this mission by delivering enterprise-grade networking and security solutions for Federal customers across U.S.-based Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and OHAI data centers. Our work supports critical workloads and the infrastructure our customers depend on.

Role Description

The Federal Network Engineering team defines network strategy, establishes standards, and delivers engineering and operational support across OHAI’s U.S.-based Federal data centers and cloud environments. Its scope includes core routing and switching, firewall management and security services, advanced network fabrics, OCI cloud networking, and network automation. The team also oversees network monitoring and hardware and software lifecycle management to maintain a secure, reliable, and scalable environment.

As a Principal Network Development Engineer, you will help lead the migration of Federal customers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This role requires deep network architecture expertise and extensive migration experience, with a focus on maintaining availability, performance, and security throughout the transition.

Working across engineering, architecture, operations, and automation teams, you will simplify network designs, standardize infrastructure, and reduce operational risk. Your work will help transform traditional data center networks into cloud-native infrastructure while protecting the critical services our Federal customers depend on.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

Network Design, Development, and Validation:

• Designs and develops advanced network systems that support scalable enterprise, data center, or cloud environments, ensuring alignment with existing infrastructure patterns.
• Validates production networks and develops scaling strategies for diverse and evolving use cases across systems or services.
• Participates in solution architecture discussions, providing technical guidance on network requirements, tradeoffs, and design decisions.
• Identifies and assesses complex risks in network design and recommends mitigation strategies before deployment.
• Collaborates with vendors and internal stakeholders to align on hardware, firmware, software, and cloud network code requirements.
• Designs playbooks for resolving common and uncommon network issues involving moderately complex systems.
• Analyzes network workflows to identify inefficiencies and proposes scalable solutions to improve performance.

Automation and Scripting:

• Designs and builds advanced modules within automation frameworks to support testing, operations, and service reliability across multiple environments.
• Automates high-impact network tasks for production and lab environments, and optimizes repetitive, cross-team workflows to improve operational efficiency.
• Develops and maintains advanced dashboards, telemetry tools, and alerting systems to enable proactive monitoring and faster issue resolution.
• Writes, enhances, and documents reusable scripts that streamline routine network operations across teams and product domains.
• Modifies and extends infrastructure pipelines and configuration management tools to meet evolving requirements using existing playbooks and custom logic.
• Independently configures and extends tools to support new products or services, ensuring alignment with platform standards and integration best practices.

Testing and Quality Assurance:

• Designs and develops advanced test strategies and reusable test cases that validate complex network systems and enhance long-term network integrity and reliability.
• Leads team-level test practices and cross-functional collaboration, helping define robust testing protocols and ensuring consistency in execution across environments.
• Implements and refines post-incident validation methods, integrating break-fix outcomes and lessons learned into continuous test improvements.
• Reviews and approves L1 and L2 network changes and presents high-impact changes to cross-team change management boards, ensuring risks are understood and mitigated.
• Partners with cross-functional teams to drive pre-production validation efforts, ensuring systems and environments meet compliance and deployment-readiness criteria.
• Prepares and delivers audit documentation and test evidence to support internal Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) processes, maintaining alignment with security and policy requirements.

Monitoring and Reliability:

• Works with others (e.g. monitoring teams) to customize dashboards, telemetry pipelines, and alerting systems, defining service level objectives (SLOs) based thresholds and metrics to monitor network health.
• Partners with monitoring and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to refine alerting systems and enhance early detection of network anomalies and degradation.
• Leads incident response during support rotations, driving root cause analysis and coordinating cross-team resolution for escalated issues.
• Builds and improves internal tools that enable frontline support teams to efficiently respond to network failures and recurring operational issues.

Cross-Team Collaboration and Leadership:

• Drives test and deployment milestones in collaboration with project/program managers, adapting plans to address risks and ensure cross-team alignment.
• Mentors junior engineers and acts as a technical SME, providing hands-on guidance in resolving complex issues.
• Leads customer engagements on technical escalations and delivers clear, actionable root cause analysis (RCA) documentation.
• Influences team-level roadmap and architecture decisions, contributing solutions that align with broader engineering goals.
• Coordinates with vendors and internal teams to resolve standards misalignment, ensuring integration meets technical and operational expectations.

Performance and Capacity Management:

• Leads analysis of network performance metrics (e.g., latency, throughput, packet loss) to identify systemic inefficiencies and drive scalable improvements.
• Forecasts infrastructure needs using performance and capacity data, ensuring systems are prepared for anticipated traffic and service growth.

Required Qualifications

• United States citizenship and federal criminal background check processing including but not limited to submission of SF-86 are requirements for this role.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, related field or equivalent practical & demonstrated experience.
• 7+ years experience engineering and operating data center focused networking solutions from Cisco, Palo Alto, Citrix, and F5 load balancers.
• 7+ years of experience in Virtual Cloud Network technologies (OCI, Azure, AWS, GCS, etc).
• Expert level knowledge of multiple network operating systems including Cisco IOS/NX-OS/ACI-OS, PAN-OS, Arista EOS, etc.
• Expert level experience with internet routing protocols and concepts, including but not limited to IP, BGP, iBGP, EGP, MPLS, IS-IS, OSPF, IPSEC, & NAT.
• Expert level knowledge of IP addressing, CIDR, and RFC 1918 strategy and implementation best practices.
• Expert level knowledge of Layer 4-7 protocols including TCP, UDP, SMB, RCP, TLS, SSL, HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, SNMP, SMTP, and SSH.
• Advanced level knowledge building and deploying Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in Cloud environments (OCI, AWS, Azure, GCP) using Terraform.
• Advanced level automation experience including proficiency in a combination of languages such as Python, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, JSON, and YAML.
• Deep understanding of cloud networking constructs - VPC/VCN, DRG/TGW, VPN, private connectivity technologies, subnets, firewalls, load balancers, routing, and security lists.

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