Title Senior Principal Network Architect

Who are we?

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet. A place where tech thinkers and future builders turn bold ideas into breakthrough experiences, we welcome your unique perspective. Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers—because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you—because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work.

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’s 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.

• 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.

• 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, Dev Ops/operations, security, tooling, networking products/solutions.
• Top‑tier relevant network design or network engineering leadership with software‑defined, cloud‑native networking technologies and ecosystems, with detailed knowledge across layers 2‑3 control and network data planes and preferably networking operating systems.
• 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 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…