Principal Network Architect

Contract with option to extend or go permanent

3 locations - Durham, NC or Hopkinton, MA or Austin, TX (onsite 5 days/week)

We are looking for a Principal Network Architect to join a high‑impact engineering team based in Round Rock, TX
. This person will architect, build, and optimize global load‑balancing solutions that support mission‑critical applications used across distributed engineering environments. The role focuses on ensuring high availability, global traffic distribution, multi‑site resiliency, and peak performance across a large‑scale enterprise environment.

• Architect, configure, and operate global load‑balancing platforms (F5 BIG‑IP LTM/GTM, GSLB, HAProxy, NGINX, and other ADC technologies).
• Design and implement high‑availability and failover strategies across multiple global sites.
• Develop and refine traffic‑routing logic including iRules, DNS/GSLB policies, health checks, SSL termination, header manipulation, and L4/L7 flow engineering.
• Monitor, analyze, and optimize performance using enterprise observability tools.
• Partner closely with application owners, engineering teams, security groups, and architects.
• Lead troubleshooting for traffic‑flow issues, failover anomalies, latency, and performance events.
• Create and maintain runbooks, operational documentation, and incident‑response procedures.
• Lead incident response and performance tuning efforts.
• Test and qualify load balancers within business‑continuity environments and build test beds as needed.

• 13+ years of hands‑on load‑balancing experience supporting high‑traffic enterprise environments.
• Expert‑level knowledge of F5 BIG‑IP (LTM, GTM/GSLB), iRules, TCP/IP, DNS, SSL
  , and application‑traffic management.
• Strong understanding of high‑availability architectures, failover mechanisms, and routing protocols.
• Experience working in multi‑site global environments.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and documentation abilities.
• Traffic Engineering: iRules, DNS/GSLB, SSL offloading, health checks, L4/L7 routing.
• Monitoring Tools: Solar Winds, Thousand Eyes, Splunk.
• Experience using design tools such as Miro or Visio.

• Background supporting large distributed systems or regulated enterprise environments.
• Familiarity with Citrix ADC, Net Scaler, Cisco ACE, or hybrid‑cloud load‑balancing solutions.
• Experience with enterprise‑scale monitoring platforms.
• Knowledge of business‑continuity strategies and approaches to high availability.

This engineer ensures that globally distributed teams have access to reliable, fast, and highly available applications. Your work directly impacts uptime, resiliency, and productivity across the organization.