Principal Network Engineer
Location: McKinney, TX (Hybrid Onsite Required)
Type: Contract-to-Hire
Eligibility: Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship (No C2C)

About the Role

We are seeking a seasoned Principal Network Engineer for a contract-to-hire opportunity with our client in McKinney, TX. This role is ideal for a deeply experienced engineer—someone who never pivoted fully to the cloud but instead doubled down on mastering on-premises, data center networking, preferably within the Telecom or Banking industries.

This position is part of the Cloud Engineering team, but don’t be misled—this is not a cloud-first role. You'll be designing, implementing, and managing high-performance network infrastructure across multiple physical data centers and hybrid environments, while also applying modern automation and monitoring techniques to maintain stability and scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and manage complex network environments across on-premises data centers and hybrid setups

• Evaluate and onboard data centers, ISPs, and networking hardware

• Configure and monitor network infrastructure, ensuring security, performance, and scalability

• Automate infrastructure provisioning using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and configuration management tools

• Optimize hardware usage through strategic capacity planning

• Implement robust observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) with alerts for proactive troubleshooting

• Manage secure and consistent deployment environments using centralized secrets management and automated patching.

Required Skills & Experience

Technical Competencies

• Expert knowledge of Linux operating system internals and architecture, with a focus on networking stability and performance tuning.

• In-depth understanding of networking layers, protocols, services, and security practices.

• Familiarity with configuring and troubleshooting network hardware and software, as well as analyzing packet captures.

• Expertise designing and managing network infrastructure across multiple data centers and public cloud environments.

• Expertise with virtualization technologies, with a focus on networking stability and performance turning.

• Experience in evaluating, qualifying, and managing networking hardware and capacity planning.

• Expertise with container management (Kubernetes, ECS, Docker, Helm)

• Expertise with configuration management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet)

• Expertise with infrastructure as code (Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi)

• Expertise with monitoring and alerting systems (Cloudwatch, Datadog, New Relic, Site24x7, Dynatrace)

• Experience with VCS systems and providers (Git, Mercurial, Github, Sourcehut)

• Experience with CI/CD systems (Github Actions, Circle CI, Argo)

• Experience with ticket management systems (Jira, Shortcut, Azure Devops)

Soft Skills

• Coaches peers and leads by influence

• Balances tactical execution with strategic foresight

• Writes clear and meaningful documentation

• Collaborates effectively across departments with empathy and professionalism

• Makes sound, data-driven decisions and can clearly articulate technical trade-offs