Principal Network Engineer

Job Title:
Principal Network Engineer

Location:
Chicago IL 60605/ New York City, NY -- 4 days onsite, 1 day remote

Perm/FTE role

Onsite 4x a week in Chicago or NYC

Our challenge is finding folks with direct HFTexperience. THIS IS A MUST HAVE

• The role requires experience with financial services, exchange or high-frequency trading environments, including low-latency networking, multicast, FPGA-based switches, high-precision timingand troubleshooting production issues.
  
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• The principal engineer must be able to work across architecture, network engineering, technical project management and detailed troubleshooting systems. ownership, accountability and driving work through to completion.
• Fintech or high-frequency trading experience,Layer 1 switching, latency monitoring, ASICs, buffer utilization, multicasttable sizes, and vendor equipment testing.
  
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Seeking a Principal Network Engineer to serve as a deep technical anchor forour global network infrastructure.

• This role is responsible for shaping the design,scalability, and long-term evolution of highly distributed, latency-sensitive trading networks across on-prem and cloud environments.
• The Principal Engineer brings expert-level knowledge of deterministic packet forwarding, advanced routing design, andultra-low latency architecture, combined with the ability to operate independently and own complex problems end-to-end.
• This individual partners closely with Network Engineering leadership and cross-functional architecture teams to leadhigh-complexity initiatives, conduct rigorous pre-implementation testing and validation, and establish best practices that drive consistency and reliability across the environment.
• They function as a technical leader without formal authority—mentoring senior engineers, influencing design decisions, and raising the overall engineering bar across the organization.
• Success in this role requires both deep technical expertise and strong communication skills.
• The Principal Engineer must be able to translate complex architectural decisions, trade-offs, and risks into clear, actionable insights for both engineering teams and senior leadership.
• The ideal candidate holds (or is actively pursuing) a CCIE certification, writes production-quality Python, and is comfortable working with modern observability platforms such as Prometheus and Grafana to drive data-informed engineering decisions.