[Hiring] Principal Engineer - Network @CrowdStrike

Role Description

You will own the IP and optical architecture for CrowdStrike's global backbone, including connectivity to traditional and neocloud providers. You'll set the multi-year roadmap governing its evolution, including:

• Traffic engineering strategy
• Capacity planning
• Demand forecasting for the network as a whole

You'll drive the initiatives that matter most to the business, from funding case through implementation and long-term operational stewardship, and act as the senior escalation resource in the 24x7 on-call rotation when an incident exceeds the depth of the engineers already on it.

What You'll Do

• Own platform selection for routing and optical hardware, working directly with vendor engineering teams to influence their roadmaps.
• Engage director- and VP-level stakeholders across datacenter, application, and business teams to keep network strategy ahead of the company's growth.
• Set the direction for network automation and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD, GitOps).
• Develop telemetry and analytics strategy, increasingly including frontier and open-weight AI models for tasks like telemetry analysis and automated triage, with sensitive backbone data kept in-house.
• Raise the technical bar of the organization by reviewing senior engineers' designs, setting standards, and mentoring them toward this level.

Qualifications

• US Citizenship or Green Card holder status
• 12+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale backbone networks, with ownership of architecture at global scale
• Deep expertise in IP/MPLS core technologies: IS-IS, MP-BGP, segment routing (SR-MPLS/SRv6), PE/P architectures, MPLS-TE, VRFs, DDoS mitigation, CDN
• Deep expertise in optical transport: DWDM, coherent optics (400G/800G), ROADM architectures, amplifier design (EDFA/Raman), dispersion management, alien wavelengths
• Strong grounding in cloud networking: direct connectivity, multi-cloud routing, and hybrid cloud at scale across major hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, OCI, Azure) and neoclouds (e.g., CoreWeave, Cerebras)
• Working depth in adjacent infrastructure domains (virtualization, containers, databases, message queuing, large-scale provisioning) sufficient to architect across boundaries
• Proven ability to set, not just execute, network automation and IaC strategy
• Familiarity with applying frontier and open-weight AI models to network operations (e.g., telemetry analysis, automated triage, ChatOps tooling), including self-hosting open-weight models where data sensitivity requires it
• Experience operating or architecting networks within FedRAMP-authorized environments
• Track record of selecting, testing, and deploying networking hardware and software organization-wide, across major vendors (Juniper, Infinera, Nokia, Arista, Cisco, etc.)
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Proven experience utilizing AI technologies to enhance decision-making, streamline workflows and processes, improve efficiency and drive business outcomes.

Benefits

• Market leader in compensation and equity awards
• Comprehensive physical and mental wellness programs
• Competitive vacation and holidays for recharge
• Paid parental and adoption leaves
• Professional development opportunities for all employees regardless of level or role
• Employee Networks, geographic neighborhood groups, and volunteer opportunities to build connections
• Vibrant office culture with world class amenities
• Great Place to Work Certified™ across the globe