Wells Fargo

Principal Network Engineer - Reliability

Wells Fargo$120K — $145K *
Telecommunications & Hardware
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years in network engineering, reliability engineering, or network operations for enterprise-level services.
  • 5+ years of deep expertise in routing, switching, TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, and related network services such as load balancing and firewalls.
  • 5+ years leading complex incident responses and communicating effectively in high-pressure situations.
  • 5+ years applying reliability engineering practices for service health measurement and continuous improvement.
  • 5+ years of experience implementing corrective actions identified in post-incident reviews.

Responsibilities

  • Define and implement reliability targets and improvements for critical network services.
  • Lead incident response efforts and facilitate root cause analysis for major incidents.
  • Influence network architecture designs to enhance resiliency and security.
  • Expand automation and observability capabilities to minimize manual tasks and improve service health.
  • Enhance operational documentation and change management processes for increased compliance and readiness.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams, mentoring engineers and translating technical issues for senior management.

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model with three days in the office each week.
  • Opportunity to influence and enhance the reliability strategy at enterprise scale.
  • Support for professional growth through collaboration and mentoring.
  • Engagement with cross-functional teams, fostering a culture of learning.
  • Limited travel requirements, allowing for more work-life balance.
Full Job Description
Why This Role Matters

In this role, you will help shape the reliability strategy for critical network services at enterprise scale. You will influence how network reliability is measured, engineered, automated, and continuously improved while partnering across infrastructure, cloud, security, application, architecture, and business teams. This is an opportunity to drive modernization, reduce operational risk, and improve the stability of services that support critical business operations.

Role Details
  • Employment Type: Full time
  • Role Type: Individual contributor; this is not a people-manager role.
  • Work Model: Hybrid work model with three days per week in the office.
  • Eligible Locations: Dallas, TX metro; Charlotte, NC metro; or Chandler, AZ metro.
  • Escalation Expectations: Provides senior technical escalation for critical incidents and high-risk changes. This role is expected to support critical incident response as needed; any recurring on-call rotation will be clearly defined before offer acceptance.
  • Travel Expectations: 5% or less.

Core Technology Stack

This role is network-centric, with primary focus on routing and switching technologies, data center fabrics, WAN and campus networking, cloud and hybrid connectivity, load balancing, DNS, NTP, firewalls, automation, telemetry, monitoring, and observability tooling.

Key Responsibilities

You will provide senior technical leadership, hands-on engineering guidance, and cross-functional influence across the following areas:

  • Network Reliability Strategy: Define and drive reliability targets, SLOs/SLIs, risk measures, service health indicators, and improvement plans for critical network services.
  • Incident Leadership: Lead major incident response and service restoration, and drive root cause analysis, corrective action planning, and prevention of repeat incidents.
  • Architecture Influence: Review, challenge, and guide network designs to improve resiliency, scalability, security, capacity, failure isolation, and operational simplicity.
  • Automation and Observability: Expand telemetry, alerting, service health reporting, configuration management, automated validation, and self-service capabilities to reduce manual toil.
  • Operational Excellence: Strengthen standards, runbooks, documentation, change quality, failure readiness, compliance-aligned practices, and production readiness reviews.
  • Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with network, cloud, security, infrastructure, application, architecture, and vendor teams while mentoring engineers and communicating complex technical issues clearly to senior stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

You should demonstrate principal-level technical depth, operational judgment, and cross-functional influence, including:

  • 7+ years of experience in network engineering, reliability engineering, or network operations supporting business-critical enterprise network services.
  • 5+ years of expert knowledge of routing, switching, TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, high-availability design, and related network services including load balancing, DNS, NTP, firewalls, and network security.
  • 5+ years of Proven ability to lead complex incident response, guide troubleshooting, restore service, and communicate clearly under pressure.
  • 5 plus years of practical experience applying SRE or reliability engineering practices, including SLOs/SLIs, problem management, service health measurement, operational health metrics, and continuous improvement.
  • 5 plus years experience improving operational stability and reducing repeat incidents through root cause analysis, post-incident reviews, corrective action planning, systemic remediation, and measurable recurrence prevention.
  • 5 plus years experience owning corrective actions from post-incident review through implementation, validation, and closure.
  • 5 plus years experience improving change success rates through risk assessment, peer review, validation testing, rollback planning, and post-change verification.
  • 5 plus years experience conducting operational readiness reviews, production readiness assessments, failure-mode reviews, or service acceptance reviews.
  • 5 plus years experience managing vendor escalations, product defects, support cases, and platform lifecycle risks that impact service stability.
  • 5 plus years experience with capacity planning, performance analysis, traffic engineering, and resiliency planning for large-scale enterprise networks.
  • 5 plus years of hands-on automation or scripting experience with tools such as Python, PowerShell, Bash, Ansible, Terraform, or equivalent technologies.
  • 5 plus years of experience improving monitoring, telemetry, alerting, dashboards, metrics, service health reporting, or performance visibility for critical infrastructure services.

Preferred Qualifications

The following qualifications are beneficial and will help a candidate be successful in this role:

  • Experience influencing enterprise network architecture and aligning designs with infrastructure, cloud, security, compliance, and architecture standards.
  • Strong technical leadership, collaboration, mentoring, written communication, verbal communication, and stakeholder influence skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to senior stakeholders.
  • Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • Relevant networking, cloud, reliability, or IT service management certifications, such as CCNP/CCIE, Juniper, Arista, AWS/Azure networking, ITIL, or equivalent credentials.
  • Ability to prioritize reliability improvements based on business impact, operational risk, service criticality, and incident trends.
  • Experience contributing to technical strategy, engineering standards, reusable design patterns, or network reliability innovation.
  • Experience with network modernization, data center migration, SDN, cloud networking, or reliability transformation initiatives.
  • Experience in regulated or critical industries such as financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, or similar environments.
  • Master’s degree in Telecommunications, Network Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
  • Experience reading and interpreting packet captures to diagnose network performance, connectivity, protocol, and application-impacting issues.

Indicators of Success

Success in this role is measured by stronger reliability outcomes, improved operational readiness, and reduced network risk.

  • Improved availability, stability, MTTD, MTTR, change success rate, and incident trends for network services.
  • Fewer repeat incidents through stronger root cause analysis, corrective action tracking, and systemic prevention.
  • Broader adoption of reliability standards, runbooks, design patterns, operational playbooks, and production readiness practices.
  • Reduced manual operational toil through practical automation, improved validation, and clearer service health visibility.
  • Stronger confidence from engineering, application, business, and leadership stakeholders in network stability, resilience, and change readiness.

Job expectations

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Network

This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship

This role is a hybrid work schedule 3 days in office 2 days remote

Posting End Date:

13 Aug 2026

*Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.

About Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo Careers

Joining Wells Fargo means becoming part of a distinguished financial institution that has been a cornerstone of innovation and leadership in the banking industry. At Wells Fargo, we offer a plethora of job opportunities designed to empower your career growth and development in a diverse and inclusive environment.

Work You’ll Do

At Wells Fargo, you will be part of a team that values diversity and is committed to fostering an inclusive culture. We are looking for professionals who are eager to drive innovation and lead with integrity. Our employees are our greatest asset, and we invest in their professional growth through comprehensive leadership and diversity training programs that are recognized industry-wide.

Explore a Multitude of Career Paths

Whether you're interested in a position in finance, IT, customer service, or management, Wells Fargo has career opportunities in various fields. Our team members benefit from job stability, competitive benefits, and a culture that values and rewards performance and dedication.

Internship Programs

Kickstart your career with a Wells Fargo internship. Our programs provide invaluable industry exposure, professional skills development, and networking opportunities that often lead to full-time employment offers. Interns at Wells Fargo work on real projects, solve actual challenges, and gain the mentorship of seasoned professionals.

Professional Growth and Development

We believe in nurturing the potential of our employees. Wells Fargo offers robust training programs and resources to help every team member excel in their current roles and prepare for future challenges. Growth at Wells Fargo is not just about climbing the career ladder but expanding your skills and expertise to add value to our team and customers.

Benefits and Rewards

Wells Fargo is committed to the well-being of our team members. We offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes health care, retirement plans, and generous paid time off. Additionally, we provide unique perks like employee discounts, adoption assistance, and tuition reimbursement.

Join Our Team

Discover the opportunities waiting for you at Wells Fargo by exploring open positions that match your skills and interests. We are continuously hiring and looking for individuals who bring creativity, passion, and a drive to serve our customers.

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Networking and Innovation

At Wells Fargo, networking and innovation go hand in hand. We encourage our employees to connect across departments and roles to foster new ideas and strategies that lead to groundbreaking solutions.

Empower Your Career

Step into a role at Wells Fargo where your skills will be honed, your achievements recognized, and your career can flourish. We're not just filling positions; we're building leaders who are equipped to navigate the complexities of the financial world. Join Wells Fargo today and be part of a team that’s redefining the future of banking.
Learn more about Wells Fargo
Size
246,577 employees
Market Cap
$155.2 billion
Industry
Net Income
$3.3 billion
Founded
1852
5 Year Trend
-5.9%
NASDAQ

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