Senior Principal Engineer, Equinix
Product Software, Network Platform
$240-360k
Salary shown for Redwood City, CA. For Toronto Office: 166,000 - 248,000 CAD. + Bonus
Digital infrastructure company
Be an early applicant
Digital infrastructure company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$240-360k
Salary shown for Redwood City, CA. For Toronto Office: 166,000 - 248,000 CAD. + Bonus
1001+ employees
Company mission
To provide finance, manufacturing, transport, government, and healthcare organizations a cloud-first world.
Role
Who you are
- Significant experience in large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure environments
- Proven success in a senior architecture role (Principal / Senior Principal level), influencing technical direction across multiple teams and domains
- Experience operating within an architecture community or peer architect model, driving alignment and shared outcomes
- Experience applying AI/ML in large-scale infrastructure or platform environments
- Familiarity with AIOps, data engineering, and production ML pipelines
- Understanding of model lifecycle management and real-time inference systems (nice to have)
- Deep expertise in modern, cloud-native and distributed software architectures
- Strong experience with control plane systems, telemetry and observability platforms, and network software stacks
- Solid grounding in large-scale network architecture and operations
- Ability to reason across hardware, software, and operational systems
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to engage across engineering, product, and senior leadership
- Proven ability to influence architectural outcomes across teams through collaboration and technical leadership
- Experience working with globally distributed teams
- Broad technical generalist with strong architectural judgment and systems thinking
- Pragmatic and outcome-oriented, focused on scalable, operable solutions aligned to business goals
What the job involves
- The Senior Principal Architect is a highly influential technical leadership role responsible for end-to-end architectural direction, technical governance, and the evolution of software and network platforms within Network Platform Engineering (NPE)
- NPE designs, builds, and operates Equinix’s global network infrastructure and platforms, including:
- Network architecture across optical, routing, switching, and SDN
- Software platforms for control, observability, automation, and operations at global scale
- Industry engagement through standards bodies and developer communities
- This role operates within a small group of senior and principal architects, requiring strong collaboration, shared ownership, and alignment across domains, while partnering closely with engineering teams and stakeholders
- The Senior Principal Architect spans software and network architecture, including control plane systems and observability, acting as a broad technical generalist who guides systems from strategy through execution and operations. This role serves as a key technical authority, driving standards, resolving escalations, and anticipating future technology shifts
- Drive software platform architecture with a system-level perspective, ensuring scalability, resilience, and operational excellence
- Shape design across control plane systems, telemetry and observability pipelines, and network platforms
- Champion automation-first design and strong operational practices
- Own architectural strategy from long-term vision through delivery and steady-state operations
- Translate business needs into architectural direction and clearly communicate trade-offs to senior stakeholders
- Partner cross-functionally to improve platform quality, operability, and readiness
- Drive adoption of AI-driven capabilities where relevant
- Act as a senior escalation point for complex, cross-domain technical issues
- Provide architectural leadership during critical incidents and ambiguous problem spaces
- Leverage data-driven insights to accelerate diagnosis and resolution
- Establish and evolve architectural governance, standards, and best practices with peer architects
- Ensure consistency across platforms while enabling team autonomy and addressing technical debt
- Promote responsible and scalable integration of AI capabilities
- Drive efficiency through automation, standardization, and simplification
- Define and track metrics for system health, performance, and architectural quality
- Influence outcomes across engineering, product, and leadership through technical expertise and collaboration
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior leadership
- Represent Equinix externally and contribute to industry standards, innovation, and emerging technologies
- The Senior Principal Architect plays a key role in Equinix’s architectural leadership community. Through close collaboration with peer architects, engineering teams, and product leaders, this role shapes platform direction, influences how systems are designed and operated, and ensures Equinix can scale effectively as it evolves
Our take
Equinix is a veteran player in the digital infrastructure market, connecting industry-leading organizations in finance, manufacturing, retail, transportation, government, healthcare, and education.
The company provides a range of services within the categories of digital, support, data center, and interconnection, with capabilities including, for example, simplifying hybrid cloud deployments or securing on-site deployments. It has an extensive range of partners, granting its clients access to a vast range of industry-leading technologies atop its own offerings.
With a wide global presence, Equinix has secured a path to continued success by its ability to keep abreast of developments in the space. The company is comfortably positioned to remain a robust and leading player across multiple growth avenues and can be expected to make more smart developments and partnerships in the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Redwood Shores, Redwood City, CA
Leadership
Adaire Fox-Martin
(CEO & President)Prior to becoming CEO of Equinix in 2024, Adaire spent nearly 3 years at Google in various roles, including Head of Google Ireland and President of Google Cloud Go to Market. She also spent nearly 14 years at SAP and over 18 years at Oracle Corporation.
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