Staff IT Network Engineer

At Ripple, we’re building a world where value moves like information does today. It’s big, it’s bold, and we’re already doing it. Through our crypto solutions for financial institutions, businesses, governments and developers, we are improving the global financial system and creating greater economic fairness and opportunity for more people, in more places around the world. And we get to do the best work of our career and grow our skills surrounded by colleagues who have our backs.

If you’re ready to see your impact and unlock incredible career growth opportunities, join us, and build real world value.

Overview:

In the role of Staff Network Engineer, you will serve as a technical architect and senior project lead for Ripple’s global corporate network infrastructure. You will promote network consistency across all offices, manage major site upgrades or new office openings, and guarantee 99.9% network uptime. We want a high-impact individual contributor who defines Ripple’s architectural standard for global connectivity. This position blends high-level planning with practical senior engineering to support a workforce spread around the world.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Leadership: Define and maintain the "Global Office Standard" (Arista/Aruba/Palo Alto). Act as the final technical point of contact for resolving any critical issues in the global network infrastructure.
• NetDevOps and Automation: Drive the transition to automated deployments. Replace manual "copy-paste" configurations with Ansible, Terraform, and Python-based workflows, applying Arista CloudVision APIs for Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP).
• Security and Zero Trust: Collaborate with the Information Security team to implement Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). Manage the lifecycle of certificate-based EAP-TLS 802.1x authentication along with SASE/SD-WAN transitions.
• Infrastructure Life Cycle: Manage multi-million dollar global hardware upgrades. Coordinate the retirement of outdated Juniper stacks and the rollout of next-generation Arista switching and Aruba Wireless solutions.
• Reliability Engineering: Ownership of the 99.9% Network availability SLA. Develop streaming telemetry and sophisticated observability dashboards (LogicMonitor/Grafana) to move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive network monitoring.
• Vendor and Project Management: Manage relationships with ISPs, hardware vendors, and professional services providers. Lead cross-functional projects to meet international deliverables.

Required Technical Expertise

• Expert-level understanding of Arista EOS (CloudVision, MLAG, VXLAN) and Aruba Central.
• Deep experience with Palo Alto Networks (Panorama, GlobalProtect, and Prisma or equivalent experience)
• Great understanding of cloud based Radius/TACACS+ authentication and certificate management platforms such as Arista AGNI, Foxpass, and ClearPass.
• Expertise in Arista (EOS/CloudVision) and Juniper (JunOS) switching/routing stacks. Experience with MLAG and LACP switch stacking for high availability.
• Senior-level experience with Aruba wireless solutions, particularly Aruba Central in extensive global deployments with high user density.
• Familiarity with enabling QOS over SD-WAN for reliable, high-quality video conferencing (Zoom) in an active/active network stack.
• Proficiency in NetDevOps tooling such as Python and Ansible. Experience using Git (GitHub/GitLab) for version-controlled network configurations.
• Advanced administration of tools like Infoblox (DNS/DHCP/IPAM) in a high-availability, multi-site environment.
• Expert knowledge of core protocols such as BGP, BFD, STP, SD-WAN, ZTNA, and 802.11ax/be wireless standards.

Soft Skills and Leadership

• Asynchronous Collaboration: Ability to clearly detail complex architectures for a distributed team (confluence, diagrams, technical specs).
• Critical Thinking: Ability to balance immediate "firefighting" with long-term technical debt reduction.
• Mentorship: A track record of leveling up junior engineers through experience with guidelines, code reviews, and technical workshops.

What Sets You Apart (Bonus)

• Experience operating within multi-vendor network stacks.
• Exposure to fast-paced, globally distributed companies.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for managing global network maintenance initiatives and new deployments.
• Familiarity with SRE principles applied to networking (Error Budgets, RCAs, and Post-mortems).