Principal Network Service Engineer (Toronto)

Job Summary

The Principal Network Engineer is a senior technical leader within the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization, responsible for designing, scaling, and maintaining highly reliable, self-healing network platforms. This role integrates AI‑driven operations, predictive analytics, observability, and advanced automation to ensure the network meets strict availability, performance, and resiliency standards.

The engineer translates business and technical requirements into scalable network capabilities, defines SLOs/SLIs for mission‑critical services, and delivers engineering artifacts for implementation teams. This role mentors engineers, supports architectural decisions, and drives continuous improvement. This posting is for a backfill position to fill an existing vacancy within our organization.

Responsibilities

• Define, maintain, and own network SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets across critical services.
• Lead major incident response efforts with AI assisted diagnostics and blameless postmortems.
• Maintain network observability frameworks including telemetry pipelines, distributed tracing, and ML‑based anomaly detection.
• Reduce operational delays through automation, AI copilots, LLM‑generated playbooks, and self‑healing workflows.
• Integrate AIOps platforms for predictive detection, anomaly correlation, and automated remediation.
• Implement generative AI workflows for script creation, documentation, and troubleshooting.
• Develop ML‑based analytics pipelines for traffic modeling, baselining, and forecasting.
• Translate requirements into scalable network capacity and capability designs.
• Deliver engineering artifacts and guide implementation teams.
• Lead live deployments of multi‑vendor network solutions and large‑scale migrations.
• Maintain guidelines, templates, and automation for SRE and Ops teams.
• Build repeatable workflows that support automation‑first operations.
• Train and mentor engineering teams through workshops and technical boot camps.
• Provide feedback across Product, Development, and QA based on operational insights.
• Participate in design reviews, functional specs, and cross‑functional architecture discussions.
• Support POCs, device testing, API validation, etc.
• Provide deployment feedback, validate automation logic, and assess system readiness.
• Deliver fulfillment for network and datacenter services using automated workflows.
• Ensure high‑quality provisioning and seamless end‑to‑end service operations.
• Collaborate with escalation teams, order fulfillment, and professional services.
• Analyze fulfillment KPIs and drive improvements in efficiency and reliability.
• Identify and resolve root causes impacting customer experience.
• Lead innovation initiatives across products, processes, and engineering teams.
• Deploy features and automation frameworks that improve reliability and customer satisfaction.
• Present at industry events and train internal teams in new developments.
• Provide cross‑industry insights to keep engineering practices aligned with modern trends.
• Mentor SRE engineers in networking, automation, observability, and reliability engineering best practices.
• Coach engineers in Service Level Objective (SLO) ownership, incident response, and resilience engineering.
• Review automation scripts and design proposals, elevating engineering quality.
• Lead training in AI‑assisted operations, AIOps tooling, and automated remediation.
• Develop skill progression plans and identify growth opportunities.
• Mentor during complex incidents and post‑incident analysis.
• Foster a culture of learning, excellence, and cross‑team collaboration.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in large‑scale networking, SRE, Net/DevOps, or related engineering roles.
• Expertise in routing, switching, BGP, IGP, MPLS, EVPN, and datacenter architectures.
• Proficiency in Python, automation frameworks, and other automation tooling.
• Strong understanding of observability including metrics, logs, traces, and telemetry.
• Experience troubleshooting distributed systems.
• Preferred: Experience with AIOps.
• Preferred: Knowledge of ML concepts.
• Preferred: Experience with self‑healing or event‑driven automation.
• Preferred: Experience presenting or publishing work in SRE, automation, or networking.

Pay Range

United States - RedwoodCity Office GHQ: 163,000 – 245,000 USD / Annual

United States - Dallas Infomart Office DAI: 136,000 – 204,000 USD / Annual

Canada - Toronto Office TRO: 131,000 – 181,000 CAD / Annual

Employee Assistance Program

An Employee Assistance program is available to all employees.

US Benefits

• Insurance: You may enroll in health, life, disability and voluntary plans that are designed for you and your eligible family members.
• Retirement: You and Equinix may contribute to a retirement plan to help you plan for your financial future.
• Paid Time Off (PTO) and Paid Holidays: You will receive an accrued amount of PTO each pay period along with various paid holidays for you to rest and recharge.

Canada Core Benefits

• Insurance: You may enroll in healthcare coverage that is designed to complement the provincial healthcare system, along with life, disability and optional benefit plans that are designed for you and your eligible family members.
• Retirement: You may also enroll in Equinix-sponsored retirement or savings plans: Defined Contribution Pension Plan (DCPP), Group Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) and Tax-Free Savings Plan (TSFA).
• Vacation and Paid Holidays: Equinix offers both vacation and personal time, along with various paid holidays for you to rest and recharge.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Equinix is an Equal Employment Opportunity and, in the U.S., an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to unlawful consideration of race, color, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, place of birth, citizenship, sex, pregnancy / childbirth or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital or domestic partnership status, age, veteran or military status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, political / organizational affiliation, status as a victim or family member of a victim of crime or abuse, or any other status protected by applicable law.