Principal Network Observability Data Architect

Who are we?

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet. 

A place where tech thinkers and future builders turn bold ideas into breakthrough experiences, we welcome your unique perspective.

Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers—because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you—because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work.

Job Summary

As the Principal Engineer for NPE Observability, you are the lead architect for the distributed systems that ingest, store, and analyze our global network state. You will bridge the gap between network protocols and big data patterns, designing high-performance ingestion engines capable of handling trillions of telemetry points. Your role is to architect massively parallel processing pipelines and stateful stream processing frameworks that enable real-time anomaly detection across our global infrastructure. You will build the high-throughput, low-latency data fabric that makes our network self-aware.

Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership & AI Evolution

• Visionary Roadmap: Define the multi-year architecture for a unified on-prem and telemetry ecosystem, evolving our global infrastructure into a self-healing "intelligent network"

• Network Data Strategy: Direct the lifecycle of network data, from GNMI/SNMP ingestion to structured storage, ensuring telemetry is normalized, consistent, and optimized for large-scale AI modeling

• AI Systems Architecture: Integrate industry-frontier practices in LLMOps, tool-use frameworks (MCP), and agentic workflows to accelerate incident root-cause analysis of telemetry data and automated remediation/alerting

Advanced Network Telemetry & Big Data

• Systems Mastery: Architect the interplay between network and application layers, optimizing the computational processing across different network protocols

• Distributed Data Pipelines: Design high-throughput, resilient pipelines proposing architectures to ingest trillions of events for predictive AIOps

• Technical Excellence & Mentorship

• Architectural Integrity: Enforce SOLID and Clean Architecture principles across network telemetry pipelines, observability data stores, and AI agent orchestration layers to ensure reliable, low-latency insight into network health

• Cultural Leadership: Act as a force multiplier by bridging NetOps, DevOps, and Security to standardize the “MELT” (Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces) strategy across all global interconnection points

• Mentorship: Level up Staff and Senior engineers through deep-dive design reviews and strategic coaching on network centric observability best practices

Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years architecting distributed systems, high-scale observability platforms, or mission-critical network software

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or a related field

• Core Languages: Expert-level proficiency in Java and Go for building high-performance systems

• Networking & Infrastructure: Deep fluency in gNMI, SNMP and Flow protocols; extensive experience architecting on Kubernetes, Jenkins and ArgoCD. Proficiency and experience working with service provider networking technologies and protocols, including BGP, IS-IS, MPLS, QoS, EVPN, VXLAN

• Observability Stack / Big data stack: Expert experience architecting distributed systems and high-scale observability fabrics, with a specialized mastery of OLAP and Time-Series Database architectures such as ClickHouse, Prometheus/Thanos, or InfluxDB. You have a proven track record of designing schemas and tuning storage engines for high-cardinality network telemetry (trillions of events), utilizing Kappa/Lambda patterns and stateful stream processing via Apache Flink and Kafka

• ·AI Expertise: Proven experience developing AI Agents using LLMs, including Function Calling, RAG, and agentic orchestration

Why Join the NPE Observability Team?

Architect the Intelligence of the Global Internet At Equinix, you aren’t just building a monitoring tool; you are designing the "central nervous system" for the world’s digital infrastructure. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead a tectonic shift from reactive dashboards to an autonomous, AI-driven "self-healing" network, solving the ultimate engineering paradox: how to maintain second-visibility across trillions of events while the very fabric of the global internet scales beneath you. This is a rare opportunity to define the industry’s North Star for network intelligence, applying cutting-edge OLAP architectures and agentic AI to a physical backbone that powers the world’s most mission-critical data.

The targeted pay range for this position in the following location is / locations are:

United States - Dallas Infomart Office DAI : 177,000 - 265,000 USD / Annual

United States - Redwood City Office GHQ : 213,000 - 319,000 USD / Annual

Our pay ranges reflect the minimum and maximum target for new hire pay for the full-time position determined by role, level, and location. The pay range shown is based on our compensation structure in place at the time of posting and may be updated periodically based on business needs. Individual pay is based on additional factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education and/or training.

The targeted pay range listed reflects the base pay only and does not include bonus, equity, or benefits. Employees are eligible for bonus, and equity may be offered depending on the position.

Equinix Benefits

As an employee, you become important to Equinix’s success. We ensure all your benefits are in line with our core values: competitive, inclusive, sustainable, connected and efficient. We keep them competitive within the current marketplace to ensure we’re providing you with the best package possible. So, wherever you are in your career and life, you’ll be able to enhance your experience and bring your whole self to work.

Employee Assistance Program : An Employee Assistance program is available to all employees.

US Benefits: - Insurance: You may enroll in health, life, disability and voluntary plans that are designed for you and your eligible family members. - Retirement: You and Equinix may contribute to a retirement plan to help you plan for your financial future. - Paid Time Off (PTO) and Paid Holidays: You will receive an accrued amount of PTO each pay period along with various paid holidays for you to rest and recharge. Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to specific plan or program terms.

Equinix is committed to ensuring that our employment process is open to all individuals, including those with a disability.  If you are a qualified candidate and need assistance or an accommodation, please let us know by completing this form .

Equinix is an Equal Employment Opportunity and, in the U.S., an Affirmative Action employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to unlawful consideration of race, color, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, place of birth, citizenship, sex, pregnancy / childbirth or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital or domestic partnership status, age, veteran or military status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, political / organizational affiliation, status as a victim or family member of a victim of crime or abuse, or any other status protected by applicable law. 

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This posting is a new position within our organization.