Principal Network Engineer (Onsite

Salary: USD
80 - USD
88.3 per hour

We are seeking a Principal Network Engineer for a W2 hourly role through Roth Staffing (Ledgent Tech is a division of Roth Staffing), with all work taking place onsite in Alameda, CA.

Pay Rate: $80.00 - $88.30/hr.

Job Start Date - 9/1/26

Job End Date - 8/31/27

Our client is growing and our IT Infrastructure needs to grow and evolve to continue to enable the business. We are looking for a Principal Engineer - Networking to own the existing network and security infrastructure but also have the determination and experience to set the standards in this area in the coming months and years.

• Designs networks with reliability, recoverability, and graceful degradation as primary engineering goals, not afterthoughts.
• Builds automation-first network operations, including automated validation, remediation, rollback, configuration deployment, and recovery workflows.
• Experience using infrastructure-as-code, configuration-as-code, or network-as-code practices to improve repeatability, auditability, and operational safety.
• Designs and implements automated health checks, synthetic testing, telemetry pipelines, and alerting that detect service-impacting conditions before customers report them.
• Uses observability data, including metrics, logs, traces, flow data, routing state, device telemetry, and packet-level evidence to diagnose reliability issues.
• Understands how to build "non-fragile" networks that become safer over time through testing, learning, automation, and continuous improvement.
• Applies reliability engineering practices to network change management, including pre-change validation, intent verification, staged rollout, canary deployment, automated rollback, and post-change verification.
• Experience designing safeguards that prevent human error from becoming production impact, including policy checks, configuration linting, peer review, and automated compliance validation.
• Experience improving mean time to detect, mean time to mitigate, and mean time to recover for network-related incidents.
• Balances reliability, security, scalability, cost, and operational simplicity when making architecture and engineering decisions.
• Provides technical leadership in establishing network reliability engineering standards, design patterns, automation frameworks, and operational readiness practices.
• Leads efforts to transform reactive network operations into proactive, measurable, and automated reliability engineering practices.
• Mentors engineers on reliability-minded design, operational excellence, incident learning, automation, and safe change practices.
• Identifies systemic reliability risks across complex network environments and drives cross-functional remediation before they result in outages.

• Develop and apply complex and long-term strategies on challenging / new concept company wide projects.
• Works on strategic initiatives with company wide impact.
• Leads in providing business solutions that balance needs, resource requirements, and long-term impact.

• Leads the successful completion of major initiatives or programs and leads ambiguous projects with high visibility and impact.
• Determine and pursue courses of action necessary to obtain desired results for company wide initiatives.
• Lead the design and delivery of solutions for the most ambiguous, high-risk technical challenges, inventing new approaches or tools.
• Own and refine end-to-end development processes, from ideation through CI/CD, security scanning, and production monitoring.

• Interacts with senior external personnel on significant technical matters with company wide impact.
• Translates overall direction and strategy and communicates across organizational levels and functions.
• Acts as advisor to management and customers on advanced technical research studies and applications.

• Own the through documentation of instructions of process for systems and applications, including architecture diagrams,…