About the RoleBlink Health is looking for a Principal Network Engineer to set the technical direction for our network and connectivity strategy across our offices and cloud environments. You'll own the architecture of our routing, switching, VPN, firewall, and cloud networking infrastructure, and act as the company's senior authority on network design, security, and resilience. This is a hands-on, high-influence role for someone who can design for scale, solve the hardest problems, and raise the bar for the engineers around them.
What You'll Do- Define and own Blink's network architecture and multi-year roadmap across on-prem and AWS, including Meraki, Palo Alto, AWS VPC, and AWS Transit Gateway
- Serve as the senior technical authority for network design in a microservices and container-based environment (AWS, Kubernetes), partnering with engineering, security, and platform teams on high-impact decisions
- Drive network-as-code and automation (IaC, CI/CD, config management) to make the network repeatable, auditable, and self-service where possible
- Establish network design standards and guardrails for security, compliance, redundancy, and high availability, and ensure they are adopted across teams
- Lead the evaluation, selection, and adoption of new products and solutions, building business cases and presenting recommendations to IT and engineering leadership
- Lead architecture for complex initiatives such as new site build-outs, cloud migrations, network segmentation, zero trust, and M&A integration
- Serve as the final technical escalation point for critical incidents; lead root cause analysis and drive systemic fixes
- Partner with security to define hardening and patching standards, and to investigate and remediate security incidents with network impact
- Design observability and monitoring strategy for network health, performance, and capacity planning
- Mentor and develop network, systems, and service desk staff; build runbooks and training that scale expertise across the team
- Own technical documentation and architecture decision records for critical systems
- Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including executive-level updates on risk, incidents, and major changes
- Participate in on-call rotation as a senior escalation resource
What You'll Need- 10+ years of experience designing and operating enterprise network environments, with a strong track record in hybrid on-prem and cloud
- Proven experience architecting and leading large-scale network initiatives in AWS and Kubernetes-based microservices environments
- Expert-level knowledge of IPSec/VPN, DNS, SNMP, OSPF, BGP, AWS VPC, Security Groups, peering, Transit Gateway, and advanced routing
- Deep understanding of how cloud, container, and virtualization technologies affect network performance, security, and design
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code and network automation (e.g., Terraform, Python, Ansible)
- Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, set standards, and drive cross-functional alignment
- Experience designing for compliance-sensitive environments (e.g., HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI)
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate technical tradeoffs for leadership
Nice to Have- Experience with Palo Alto Networks (Panorama, GlobalProtect) and Cisco Meraki at scale
- Experience with service mesh, CNI, or Kubernetes networking internals
- Relevant certifications (e.g., AWS Advanced Networking Specialty, PCNSE, CCNP/CCIE)
Logistics- Comfortable working in the Eastern Time Zone
- Ability to travel up to 10% to office sites
- Ability to work up to 4 days a week in our NYC, St. Louis, or Pittsburgh office