The Principal Engineer is responsible for developing, managing, and optimizing the organization’s global Internet interconnection strategy. This role oversees settlement-free peering, paid peering, IP transit, Internet Exchange (IX) participation, traffic engineering, routing policy, and strategic relationships with network operators, content providers, cloud providers, carriers, and Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

The ideal candidate possesses strong technical networking expertise, business negotiation skills, and industry engagement experience to improve network performance, reduce transit costs, increase resiliency, and support the company’s global connectivity objectives.

Responsibilities:

Interconnection Strategy

• Develop and execute the global peering and interconnection strategy
• Identify opportunities to expand peering relationships and optimize transit utilization
• Drive network growth through strategic partnerships with ISPs, cloud providers, content networks, CDNs, carriers, and hyperscalers
• Evaluate new IX opportunities and regional expansion initiatives
• Establish KPIs for traffic offload, cost reduction, latency improvements, and resiliency

Peering Management

• Negotiate and manage:
• Settlement-Free Peering
• Bilateral Peering
• Multilateral Peering
• Public Peering
• Private Peering
• Maintain peering policies and qualification requirements
• Manage relationships through:
• PeeringDB
• IX communities
• Industry forums
• Network operator groups
• Coordinate onboarding and operational support for new peers
• Resolve peering disputes, routing issues, and traffic imbalances

Internet Exchange (IX) Operations

• Manage participation across global Internet Exchanges
• Evaluate IX performance and ROI
• Coordinate provisioning of:
• Cross-connects
• Port upgrades
• New exchange deployments
• Develop business cases for new IX expansion
• Maintain relationships with IX operators and executive leadership

IP Transit Management

• Manage global transit providers and carrier relationships
• Conduct transit capacity planning
• Negotiate contracts and pricing
• Evaluate transit performance and redundancy requirements
• Develop strategies to reduce transit costs through increased peering
• Monitor traffic shifts between transit and peering environments

Routing & Traffic Engineering

• Define and maintain routing policies
• Optimize traffic flows across:
• Peering
• Transit
• IX fabrics
• Private interconnections
• Manage traffic engineering initiatives using:
• BGP communities
• Local Preference
• MED
• AS Path Prepending
• Analyze traffic patterns and forecast growth
• Improve latency, packet loss, and path optimization

Industry Engagement

• Represent the company at:
• NANOG
• RIPE
• APRICOT
• LACNIC
• ARIN
• APNIC
• Global Peering Forum
• Build executive-level relationships across the Internet ecosystem
• Participate in policy discussions and industry working groups
• Monitor industry trends affecting interconnection and Internet governance

Cross-Functional Leaderships

• Partner with:
• Network Engineering
• Infrastructure Operations
• Security
• Product Management
• Legal
• Procurement
• Finance
• Develop executive reporting and dashboards
• Present interconnection strategy and performance metrics to senior leadership

Required Technical Expertise

Routing Protocols

• BGP-4 (Border Gateway Protocol)
• eBGP
• iBGP
• Route Reflectors
• Confederations
• BGP Communities
• Large Communities
• Flowspec

Core Internet Protocols

• IPv4
• IPv6
• ICMP
• TCP/IP
• UDP
• MPLS

Routing Technologies

• OSPF
• IS-IS
• Segment Routing
• EVPN
• VXLAN

Internet Infrastructure

• Internet Exchanges (IX)
• Route Servers
• Route Collectors
• CDN Architectures
• Anycast
• DNS Infrastructure
• DDoS Mitigation Architectures
• Content Delivery Networks

Routing Security

• RPKI
• ROA Validation
• ASPA
• BGPsec
• MANRS
• IRR Databases
• Route Filtering
• Prefix Filtering

Monitoring & Analytics

• NetFlow
• sFlow
• IPFIX
• SNMP
• Telemetry
• Traffic Analytics Platforms
• Capacity Planning Tools

Cloud & Interconnection Platforms

• AWS Direct Connect
• Azure ExpressRoute
• Google Cloud Interconnect
• Oracle FastConnect
• Equinix Fabric
• Megaport

Business & Commercial Responsibilities

• Peering negotiations
• Transit contract negotiations
• Capacity planning and budgeting
• Vendor management
• Cost optimization initiatives
• SLA management
• Risk assessment and mitigation
• Executive reporting and forecasting

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Telecommunications, or related field
• 15+ years related engineering experience
• 7+ years of Internet networking experience
• 5+ years of peering, transit, or interconnection experience
• Experience managing relationships with ISPs, carriers, cloud providers, and IX operators
• Proven experience negotiating peering and transit agreements
• Experience operating large-scale global networks

Preferred Certifications

• CCNP Service Provider
• CCIE Service Provider
• JNCIP-SP
• JNCIE-SP
• AWS Advanced Networking Specialty
• MANRS Certification Knowledge
• RPKI Deployment Experience

This position is based in our Reston, VA office and offers a hybrid work schedule.

The pay range is $180,700 - $244,500.

The anticipated annual base salary range for this position is noted above, however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience. Verisign offers a discretionary bonus which is based on individual and company performance, and certain roles may be eligible for discretionary stock awards.