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Principal Cloud Network Engineer

Microsoft· Cloud Network Engineering
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Redmond, WA$142.8k - $274.8kFull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Microsoft is hiring a Principal Cloud Network Engineer to lead high-impact network validation, live-site operations, automation, and AI-enabled improvements for scalable, multi-vendor networks supporting AI infrastructure and GPU clusters.

Responsibilities

  • Define and lead end-to-end network validation strategies across network operating systems, routing features, hardware platforms, configurations, and automation services, covering unit, integration, virtual lab, physical lab, canary, and production environments.
  • Architect extensible, vendor-agnostic testing frameworks to validate control-plane convergence, data-plane behavior, failure recovery, scalability, performance, interoperability, upgrade and downgrade safety, and platform stability across multi-vendor networks.
  • Establish risk-based quality standards and release-readiness criteria, including test coverage, quality gates, regression requirements, reproducible lab environments, and reusable tests and safeguards derived from production incidents and defects.
  • Provide technical leadership for complex network failures and live-site incidents, using telemetry, packet captures, logs, protocol state, topology, and hardware signals to isolate issues, identify systemic failure patterns, and drive corrective actions.
  • Define and improve network operational readiness and reliability, including telemetry, alerting, service-level indicators, troubleshooting, rollback, post-deployment validation, capacity analysis, self-healing mechanisms, and secure escalation processes.
  • Architect and build network automation and CI/CD systems, including source of truth, intent and metadata as code, automated validation, progressive deployment, health gates, rollback, drift detection, reconciliation, and operational automation.
  • Provide technical leadership across teams, driving high-impact architectural decisions, aligning engineering, operations, security, and vendor stakeholders, mentoring engineers, and establishing standards for code quality, observability, testing, documentation, configuration management, and service ownership.
  • Define and execute an AI strategy for network engineering, applying AI capabilities to improve engineering efficiency, network operations, troubleshooting, automation, reliability, and measurable operational outcomes.

Qualifications

  • Doctorate Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation OR Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation OR Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation OR equivalent experience.

Skills

Required:Network design and automationNetwork validationLive-site incident leadership
Last updated Oct 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Microsoft

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