Principal Network Engineer - remote across UK or Ireland

We’re looking for a Principal Network Engineer to be the most senior technical lead for network engineering at a global payments technology company. You’ll set direction for the whole network across data centres and public cloud, and turn it into automated, self-service capabilities that engineers use without raising a ticket. Success is measured by the requests that no longer need to be made.

This is a hands-on role for a network engineer who has made the move to automation and software engineering. You’ll write code every week, use AI tools daily and work autonomously in a fully remote team across the US and Europe., * Keep the network’s intended state in source control, managing switches, routers, firewalls and cloud networking through Terraform, Ansible and vendor APIs, with automated validation before any production change

• Build self-service capabilities with policy checks and guardrails for common requests such as network segments, VPCs, firewall rules and private connectivity
• Design Palo Alto segmentation and firewall policy as code, keeping PCI DSS cardholder data scope tight
• Design and evolve routing and switching (BGP, VXLAN/EVPN) across data centres and cloud interconnects
• Provide load balancing and traffic steering as code, integrated with service discovery
• Build PCI DSS and SOX controls into the network, with automated backups, drift detection and audit evidence
• Ship every capability with telemetry, flow data and alerting, and run what you build, including on-call and failover testing
• Mentor senior engineers and lead the most significant designs and build-versus-buy decisions

• Extensive experience as a principal or lead network engineer in production enterprise environments
• Expert routing and switching: BGP, OSPF, VXLAN/EVPN, plus networking in AWS, Azure, OCI or GCP
• Firewall policy and segmentation in regulated environments, ideally PCI DSS and SOX
• Proven network automation with Terraform, Ansible, vendor APIs and a network source of truth
• Production-quality code in Python, Go or similar, using Git, pull requests and CI, not just procedural scripts
• Daily use of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, with a safety-first approach to reviewing agent output
• Clear writing and the confidence to explain design trade-offs and make the case for new approaches

Nice to Have

• Palo Alto (including Panorama), Juniper and Cisco
• HAProxy Enterprise, HashiCorp Consul, NetBox, Cloudflare and Splunk
• Experience designing or reviewing MCP servers for AI agents

• Up to £115k salary + bonus
• Fully remote
• Unlimited PTO
• Pension, 5% employer contribution rising to 7% after 3 years
• Private medical insurance, including optical and dental