Sr. Principal System Architect - SONiC Software

SONiC Software System Architect

At Jabil, we are proud to be a trusted partner for the world's top brands, offering comprehensive engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing solutions. With 60 years of experience across industries and a vast network of over 100 sites worldwide, Jabil combines global reach with local expertise to deliver both scalable and customized solutions. Our commitment extends beyond business success as we strive to build sustainable processes that minimize environmental impact and foster vibrant and diverse communities around the globe.

SONiC Software System Architects at Jabil collaborate with customers, sales and product planning to establish the technical direction for Jabil design teams in the switch gear market.

As a SONiC System Architect, you will be expected to:

• Demonstrate expertise in SONiC and switch platform architecture that matches or exceeds customer expectations.
• Assess technical requirements and define competencies needed during quoting.
• Develop system architectures and monitor technical direction through product development.
• Mentor others in the organization to build team design capability

In your role you will:

• Advise customers, product planning, and business development on technology tradeoffs for switch platforms.
• Defining end-to-end system architecture for datacenter switch platforms running SONiC from hardware abstraction, control plane, management and tooling.
• Establish technical direction for customer originated projects and Jabil's own cloud compute product offerings. Technical direction includes:
• Alignment to product requirements documents
• Architectural tradeoffs on cost, complexity, and schedule
• SONiC core, platform, SAI feature planning and gap analysis
• Inter-generation, cross ASIC, and open-source leverage strategy and risk planning.
• Collaborate with system architects and leads in electrical, thermal, BMC, BIOS, FPGA, validation, RAS, and OS domains.
• Communicate technical direction to Jabil development teams through architecture specs, interface contracts, and handoff documentation.
• Stay current on vendor technologies, SAI/SDK roadmaps, optics ecosystems, and industry initiatives such as DMTF, and OCP.
• Remain ready to architect for the latest industry trends including areas such as SONiC, OpenBMC, DMTF, Open Compute (OCP) and others.
• Deep dive into new or open-ended areas utilizing prior networking, platform, and systems engineering experience.
• Contribute to the improvement of our architecture methods, templates, and processes.
• Train, mentor, and coach engineers on SONiC architecture and platform integration.

Job Qualifications & Knowledge Requirements

Technical Knowledge & Skills

• Capability to research and explore unfamiliar technologies and concepts with a focus on feasibility, integration risks and schedule impacts.
• Ability to translate product and customer requirements into technical specifications, phase delivery plans.
• In depth knowledge of architecture of SWSS orch agents, Redis databases, syncd, SAI object model, platform daemons, FRUs, transceiver and port configuration.
• Experience porting platforms and adding features to sonic-buildimage.
• Experience with Broadcom and Marvell switch ASICs (SDK, OpenSAI or vendor SAI, port breakout, buffer/QoS concepts)
• Knowledgeable about datacenter L2/L3 switching, routing (BGP, ECMP), overlays, as well as link bring-up concepts.
• Familiarity with the Intel, AMD, Nvidia or ARM CPU/GPU architectures. Specifically, an understanding of how the firmware stack operates and interacts with the core system components
• Proficiency in C++, python, git, CI/CD, and agile delivery.
• Ability to review code and set standards as well as awareness of modern development practices and test automations.
• Experience working with industry standards for IPMI, Redfish, MCTP, PLDM, SMBus, i2c, i3c, SPI, etc.
• Familiarity with Secure Boot, SPDM, Platform Root of Trust, and NIST SP 800-193 standards.
• Fluency in reading block diagrams and familiarity with system design preferred
• Fluency in server management (provisioning, deployment, management, service) is preferred.
• Expertise with Linux, kernel, device drivers, and user space platform integrations.

Non-Technical Knowledge & Skills

• Influence stakeholders and share architecture best practices across teams.
• Communicate clearly in English through written specs, reviews, and customer facing discussion.
• Work effectively as part of a global, distributed engineering team.
• Assess projects, articulate technical and schedule risks, and define meaningful milestones.
• Mentor less experienced engineers.
• Break down customer requirements into actionable engineering work items with clear acceptance criteria.

Education & Experience Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or Electrical Engineering required
• 7+ years' experience in switch design and engineering

Be aware of fraud: When applying for a job at Jabil you will be contacted via correspondence through our official job portal with a jabil.com e-mail address; direct phone call from a member of the Jabil team; or direct e-mail with a jabil.com e-mail address. Jabil does not request payments for interviews or at any other point during the hiring process. Jabil will not ask for your personal identifying information such as a social security number, birth certificate, financial institution, driver's license number or passport information over the phone or via e-mail. If you believe you are a victim of identity theft, contact the Federal Bureau of Investigations internet crime hotline ( the Federal Trade Commission identity theft hotline ( and/or your local police department. Any scam job listings should be reported to whatever website it was posted in.

Jabil, including its subsidiaries, is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.