Principal Engineer, Product Software

Equinix • Redwood City, CA

19h • Onsite

About The Position

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet. A place where tech thinkers and future builders turn bold ideas into breakthrough experiences, we welcome your unique perspective. Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers—because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you—because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work. As the Principal Engineer for Equinix Fabric Product Software, you are the visionary architect for the platforms that power Equinix’s global interconnection services. You will work with product management team and cross-functional engineering teams, analyze product requirements, lead architecture design, define APIs and contracts. You will be able to lead a small engineering team to develop product software from PoC to public release, to deploy in production, and resolve customer issues.

Requirements

• Experience: 12+ years of software development experience, with at least 6+ years in a Principal, Architect, or high-impact Technical Lead role. You have a proven track record of delivering large-scale distributed systems from initial concept to global production.
• Education: Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Networking & Infrastructure: Deep fluency in the 7-layer OSI model and its application in developing management and control plane software. Expertise in Cloud Networking and Virtual Network Functions (VNF), specifically how they interface with physical infrastructure. Hands-on mastery of Kubernetes (K8s) and Docker, with experience architecting containerized microservices at scale.
• Distributed Systems & Data: Working experience with high-throughput messaging services like Apache Kafka for real-time data orchestration. Expertise in choosing and tuning RDBMS and NoSQL technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL, Cassandra, or Redis) based on specific consistency and availability requirements.
• API & Connectivity Strategy: Expert-level proficiency in REST API design (OpenAPI/Swagger). Experience building "Northbound" interfaces for customer consumption and "Southbound" interfaces for hardware/network automation.
• AI Strategy & Digital Evolution: Proven ability to evaluate and integrate Generative AI and Agentic workflows into the software development lifecycle to drive engineering productivity.
• Architectural Vision for AI: Experience defining the use of LLMs, Function Calling, and emerging standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) to transform legacy manual processes into autonomous, self-healing services.
• Soft Skills: Exceptional Communication: Ability to translate complex technical "debt" or architectural needs into business value for executive stakeholders.
• Mentorship: A passion for developing the next generation of engineers through rigorous code reviews and architectural coaching.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership and AI Evolution Platform Vision: Define and drive the multi-year technical roadmap to evolve Equinix Fabric into a fully programmable, self-service Connectivity-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform.
• AI & Agentic Workflows: Architect the integration of Generative AI, LLMOps, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) into the product lifecycle. Lead initiatives to move from manual workflows to "Agentic" automation for service provisioning and customer support.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Act as a force multiplier by bridging the gap between Product Management, Network Engineering, and DevOps to ensure technical designs align with long-term business scale.
• Architectural Excellence & Product Innovation System Design: Lead the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, ensuring adherence to SOLID, Clean Architecture, and cloud-native design patterns.
• API First Strategy: Standardize API contracts and Northbound/Southbound interfaces to ensure seamless integration across the Equinix ecosystem and partner clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Technical Governance: Oversee deep-dive design reviews and set the "gold standard" for code quality, security, and scalability across multiple engineering pods.
• Execution & Mentorship Complex Problem Solving: Serve as the final escalation point for the most challenging technical "bottlenecks," from deep-seated concurrency issues to global-scale performance tuning.
• Mentorship: Level up Staff and Senior engineers through strategic coaching, fostering a culture of technical curiosity and engineering excellence.
• Emerging Tech Advocacy: Continuously evaluate and prototype emerging technologies to keep Equinix at the frontier of the industry.

Benefits

• Employee Assistance Program: An Employee Assistance program is available to all employees.
• US Benefits: - Insurance: You may enroll in health, life, disability and voluntary plans that are designed for you and your eligible family members.
• - Retirement: You and Equinix may contribute to a retirement plan to help you plan for your financial future.
• - Paid Time Off (PTO) and Paid Holidays: You will receive an accrued amount of PTO each pay period along with various paid holidays for you to rest and recharge.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal