Principal Network Engineer Jobs in Tennessee (NOW HIRING)

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is building the next generation of cloud technologies at massive scale. Our customers run some of the world's most demanding workloads, and our network products form the foundation of OCI's rapidly expanding global cloud footprint.
The Network Products Engineering organization defines, develops, qualifies, and delivers the networking products that power OCI data centers worldwide. We partner closely with hardware vendors, software engineering, network engineering, operations, supply chain, finance, and product organizations to deliver scalable, reliable, and cost-effective networking solutions.
We are seeking a Principal Network Developer (IC4) to provide technical leadership within Network Products Engineering. This senior individual contributor will contribute to the architectural direction and lead high-level designs for data center networking products and assigned initiatives. The role will engage internal and external customers to understand requirements, translate them into practical technical solutions, and provide oversight and technical review of low-level designs produced by adjacent engineering teams. The successful candidate will also guide the development, validation, qualification, deployment readiness, and lifecycle improvement of next-generation network products.
The ideal candidate has strong experience collaborating with switch, router, ASIC, optical, component, and manufacturing partners to align product capabilities with OCI requirements, influence roadmaps for assigned technologies, and drive execution to OCI standards and designs. This highly cross-functional role works across Network Engineering, Network Operations, Software Engineering, Supply Chain, Finance, Procurement, and Manufacturing. Success requires sound technical judgment, ownership of complex initiatives, effective customer and vendor engagement, mentorship of other engineers, and the ability to achieve results through collaboration and indirect influence.
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.
Core Responsibilities
Planning & Execution:
-Manages and coordinates moderately complex tasks, monitoring timelines and deliverables to ensure timely completion and adherence to requirements for a moderately-sized project or initiative. Efficiently delegates, monitors, and prioritizes work across multiple projects, providing technical oversight and adjusting plans to address shifts in resources or timelines.
Collaboration & Partnership:
-Collaborates across the organization to align on expectations and achieve shared objectives. Leverages understanding of business leaders, stakeholders, and/or customers to ensure proposed solutions meet their needs. Supports inclusivity by actively seeking and listening to diverse perspectives, ensuring others feel heard and respected.
Problem Solving:
-Identifies and addresses moderately complex issues by analyzing a wide range of data and/or information to identify solutions in accordance with standard practices. Proactively escalates unresolved or critical issues with a thorough assessment and suggests potential solutions. Reviews, contributes to, and documents problem-solving strategies.
Continuous Learning:
-Pursues learning opportunities to expand knowledge and skills and/or tools in new areas and stays abreast of the latest industry trends and best practices. Proactively seeks and leverages ongoing feedback and training to improve skills. Coaches and mentors junior team members, fostering continuous learning and knowledge sharing within and across teams.
Continuous Improvement:
-Develops ideas, recommends updates, and/or collaborates on the implementation of process improvements to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, protocols, and workflows across teams, and evaluates the impact on key stakeholders. Solicits feedback from others on ideas for alternative approaches and methods for continued improvement.
Performance and Development:
-Contributes to the talent development pipeline by participating in candidate interviews, assessing candidates, and providing hiring recommendations.
Qualifications
Disclaimer:
Certain U.S. based or U.S. customer or client-facing roles may be required to comply with applicable requirements, such as immunization/occupational health mandates, and/or drug testing requirements.
Range and benefit information provided in this posting are specific to the stated locations only
US: Hiring Range in USD from: $102,300 to $209,500 per annum. May be eligible for bonus and equity.
Oracle maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to account for variations in knowledge, skills, experience, market conditions and locations, as well as reflect Oracle's differing products, industries and lines of business.
Candidates are typically placed into the range based on the preceding factors as well as internal peer equity.
Oracle US offers a comprehensive benefits package which includes the following:
1. Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
2. Short term disability and long term disability
3. Life insurance and AD&D
4. Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
5. Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
6. Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
7. 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
8. Paid time off: Flexible Vacation is provided to all eligible employees assigned to a salaried (non-overtime eligible) position. Accrued Vacation is provided to all other employees eligible for vacation benefits. For employees working at least 35 hours per week, the vacation accrual rate is 13 days annually for the first three years of employment and 18 days annually for subsequent years of employment. Vacation accrual is prorated for employees working between 20 and 34 hours per week. Employees working fewer than 20 hours per week are not eligible for vacation.
9. 11 paid holidays
10. Paid sick leave: 72 hours of paid sick leave upon date of hire. Refreshes each calendar year. Unused balance will carry over each year up to a maximum cap of 112 hours.
11. Paid parental leave
12. Adoption assistance
13. Employee Stock Purchase Plan
14. Financial planning and group legal
15. Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance
The role will generally accept applications for at least three calendar days from the posting date or as long as the job remains posted.
Career Level - IC4
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