Principal Network Engineer

Principal Network Engineer

Location: Chicago IL 60605/ New York City, NY -- 4 days onsite, 1 day remote

Perm/FTE role

Job Summary

Onsite 4x a week in Chicago or NYC

Our challenge is finding folks with direct HFT experience. THIS IS A MUST HAVE

• The role requires experience with financial services, exchange or high-frequency trading environments, including low-latency networking, multicast, FPGA-based switches, high-precision timing and troubleshooting production issues.
• The principal engineer must be able to work across architecture, network engineering, technical project management and detailed troubleshooting systems. ownership, accountability and driving work through to completion.
• Fintech or high-frequency trading experience, Layer 1 switching, latency monitoring, ASICs, buffer utilization, multicast table sizes, and vendor equipment testing.

Role Overview

• This role is responsible for shaping the design, scalability, and long-term evolution of highly distributed, latency-sensitive trading networks across on-prem and cloud environments.
• The Principal Engineer brings expert-level knowledge of deterministic packet forwarding, advanced routing design, and ultra-low latency architecture, combined with the ability to operate independently and own complex problems end-to-end.
• This individual partners closely with Network Engineering leadership and cross-functional architecture teams to lead high-complexity initiatives, conduct rigorous pre-implementation testing and validation, and establish best practices that drive consistency and reliability across the environment.
• They function as a technical leader without formal authority—mentoring senior engineers, influencing design decisions, and raising the overall engineering bar across the organization.
• Success in this role requires both deep technical expertise and strong communication skills.
• The Principal Engineer must be able to translate complex architectural decisions, trade-offs, and risks into clear, actionable insights for both engineering teams and senior leadership.
• The ideal candidate holds (or is actively pursuing) a CCIE certification, writes production-quality Python, and is comfortable working with modern observability platforms such as Prometheus and Grafana to drive data-informed engineering decisions.

1. Design and evolve low-latency, highly resilient network architecture across global data center, co-location, and cloud-connected environments, with a focus on deterministic packet forwarding, scalability, and operational consistency
2. Lead advanced routing design and implementation across complex global environments, including BGP, OSPF, MPLS, multicast, hybrid cloud connectivity, traffic engineering, and high-availability network patterns
3. Conduct deep technical research, lab validation, and pre-implementation testing for major network initiatives, working closely with engineering and software development teams to evaluate hardware capabilities, identify design constraints, and optimize exchange performance based on findings
4. Lead high-complexity strategic projects from design through execution, producing detailed technical designs, migration runbooks, capacity plans, and implementation guidance for large-scale network changes
5. Develop and maintain Python-based network automation to support configuration management, change validation, testing, and operational efficiency, with direct experience using both API-driven and SSH-based automation approaches
6. Partner across infrastructure, security, application, and business teams to align network design and delivery with technical requirements, operational goals, and broader organizational priorities, including support for budgeting and planning related to network hardware and software investments
7. Serve as a senior technical leader and mentor across the engineering organization, driving architecture reviews, design standards, knowledge sharing, and technical development for other engineers
8. Operate effectively in a fast-moving, dynamic environment where priorities can shift, balancing long-term architectural direction with immediate engineering and operational needs
9. Contribute to monitoring and telemetry strategy by helping define meaningful visibility requirements and supporting the use of tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or similar platforms where they improve operational insight and troubleshooting
10. Support the development of technical standards, design documentation, and regulatory or audit-facing materials when needed, including documentation that may be used to support SEC or other regulatory review processes

1. 10+ years of hands-on network engineering experience in mission-critical, low-latency environments, with a strong