Principal Network Engineer

Job Description The Principal Network Engineer serves as the organization's highest-level technical authority for enterprise networking, connectivity, automation, and infrastructure engineering. This role is responsible for input to network strategy, standards, technology roadmaps, and engineering governance across retail, distribution, corporate, cloud, and remote-access environments. The Principal Network Engineer partners closely with Architecture, Security, Cloud, Infrastructure, Operations, and business leaders to deliver secure, scalable, resilient, and future-ready network services that support enterprise growth and digital transformation initiatives.

Location & Work Availability:

This position is Hybrid (4 days in office, 1 day remote), based at our corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Key Responsibilities:

Provide data to drive enterprise networking strategy, standards, and roadmaps across retail, distribution center, campus, data center, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Lead the design and engineering of highly scalable, resilient, and secure networking solutions aligned with long-term business objectives and enterprise architecture principles.

Provide technical leadership and governance across routing, switching, wireless, SD-WAN, internet, cloud connectivity, and emerging networking technologies.

Serve as the highest level of escalation for complex technical issues, major incidents, problem management activities, and root cause analysis efforts.

Lead cross-functional technology reviews, evaluations, and modernization initiatives while influencing enterprise-wide technical decisions.

Mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and drive continuous improvement across the network engineering organization.

Partner with vendors and strategic technology providers to evaluate solutions, influence product direction, and optimize platform investments.

Automation, Infrastructure as Code & Reliability Engineering Define and lead Infrastructure as Code (IaC) strategy utilizing Terraform, Ansible, Python, APIs, and cloud-native automation frameworks.

Lead and govern CI/CD pipelines and platform engineering capabilities supporting network and infrastructure deployment automation.

Establish Git Ops standards, source control governance, automated testing frameworks, and deployment validation methodologies.

Drive enterprise-scale automation initiatives focused on provisioning, configuration management, lifecycle management, compliance, remediation, and operational efficiency.

Champion observability, telemetry, analytics, AIOps, and predictive monitoring capabilities.

Lead adoption of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, resiliency frameworks, and service-level objectives.

Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
12+ years of enterprise network engineering experience with progressively increasing technical leadership responsibilities.

Extensive experience designing and supporting large-scale SD-WAN, WAN, LAN, wireless, data center, cloud, and hybrid networking environments.

Deep experience with enterprise network security architectures and modernization programs.

Technical Expertise Expert-level knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, NTP, OSPF, BGP, VPN, and enterprise routing and switching technologies.

Advanced expertise in campus, data center, cloud, WAN, SD-WAN, wireless, and hybrid networking architectures.

Deep understanding of multi-cloud networking architectures and cloud-native connectivity solutions.

CCIE, CCDE, Azure Network Engineer Expert, AWS Advanced Networking Specialty, or equivalent expert-level certifications.

Extensive experience implementing Terraform, Ansible, Python, and large-scale network automation solutions.

Success Measures Enterprise network availability, resiliency, and operational excellence.

Successful execution of strategic modernization and transformation initiatives.

Reduction of operational risk, technical debt, and recurring incidents.

Benefits

Summary:

We believe in supporting our Team Members and those they love through comprehensive health & wellness benefits. Learn more here:  Overview:

Advance Auto Parts, Inc. is a leading automotive aftermarket parts provider that serves both professional installer and do-it-yourself customers. As of January 3, 2026, Advance operated 4,305 stores primarily within the United States, with additional locations in Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Company also…