Principal Network Architect Jobs
Principal Network Architect jobs are open across telecommunications, cloud infrastructure, financial services, defense contracting, and healthcare, from senior engineer to staff and principal levels, with specializations in SD-WAN, zero-trust security architecture, and large-scale data center design. Scan the live roles below and apply to whichever ones fit.
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MITRE's Advanced Wireless & SATCOM Department, within the Infrastructure, Networking, and Communications Division, provides independent communications engineering, network architecture, and technical analysis in support of critical national missions. We seek a senior technical leader with deep, practical telecommunications backbone and carrier-core experience to help federal cybersecurity and critical-infrastructure partners understand how diverse telecom networks are built, interconnected, operated, monitored, and defended. This position emphasizes mission-driven engineering analysis, technical leadership, and trusted-advisor support across legacy and modern telecommunications systems.
Roles & Responsibilities:
-
Serve as a senior technical advisor on telecommunications carrier core, backbone, transport, and service architectures in support of cybersecurity, infrastructure defense, and mission assurance activities.
-
Characterize end-to-end fixed & mobile telecom architectures, including signaling, control & user planes, network functions, interconnects, routing, management systems, and network visibility points.
-
Partner with cyber analysts and threat hunting teams to turn mission questions into technically sound hypotheses, telecom-specific analysis methods, applicable telemetry sources, and practical findings, highlighting gaps and limitations in visibility.
-
Assess telecommunications network security, service dependencies, fault & failure modes, resilience, and attack surfaces and recommend engineering mitigations and testable approaches grounded in actual carrier network behavior.
-
Shape and support collaborative government-industry technical pilots and COOP activities, including PACE communications planning and alternative transport & service approaches.
-
Develop and independently review system and reference architectures, interface & dataflow diagrams, technical trade studies, analysis reports, integration plans, and briefings that prioritize actions and make informed decisions.
- Collaborate directly with federal mission stakeholders, telecom operators, equipment vendors, and multidisciplinary engineering teams to reconcile requirements, validate technical assumptions, and communicate recommendations clearly.
Basic Qualifications:
-
Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline with 10 years of related experience; or Master’s with 7 years; or PhD with 5 years; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.
-
Substantial direct, hands-on experience engineering, architecting, integrating, troubleshooting, or technically assessing production-scale carrier telecommunications networks and their operational behavior.
-
Demonstrated end-to-end understanding of carrier-grade telecommunications infrastructure beyond 5G radio access, including core network functions, IP transport & routing, signaling & interconnection, and the relationship between network elements, services, and operational telemetry.
-
Ability to analyze complex communications architectures and identify network dependencies, technical risks, network behavior, and security & monitoring opportunities across heterogeneous legacy and modern systems.
-
Experience developing technically sound architecture assessments, problem analyses, trade studies, or engineering recommendations that inform operational or programmatic decisions.
-
Demonstrated senior technical leadership and ability to work effectively across engineering teams, government stakeholders, and industry partners.
-
Ability to obtain and maintain the personnel suitability and access determinations required for assigned federal sponsor work.
-
Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a DHS Fitness clearance. Per the U.S. Government’s eligibility requirements, you must be a U.S Citizen to be considered for a security clearance.
- This position requires a minimum of 3 days a week on-site.
Preferred Qualifications:
-
Direct engineering experience with multiple generations of commercial mobile-core or fixed telecom networks, such as LTE & 5G, EPC & 5GC, IMS, Diameter, and associated roaming & interconnect architectures.
-
Experience with large-scale IP, MPLS, BGP, optical transport, DCI, and carrier operations & support systems and ability to explain how these components interact.
-
Hands-on experience with telecommunications threat hunting, network security analysis, incident investigation, protocol & packet inspection, or mapping threats to carrier network elements and exploitable visibility & detection points.
-
Experience with communications resiliency and COOP analysis, including critical infrastructure dependencies, failure propagation, alternate communications pathways, and PACE planning.
-
Experience supporting government-industry technical pilots, multistakeholder reference architectures, and evaluations of various telecom technologies.
-
Prior work with telecommunications carriers, major network equipment suppliers, critical infrastructure operators, or federal mission sponsors in a senior technical advisor or chief architect role.
- Existing sponsor suitability determination or prior experience onboarding to federal civilian mission environments, with the ability to engage effectively in time-sensitive sponsor work.
This requisition requires the candidate to have a minimum of the following clearance(s):
This requisition requires the hired candidate to have or obtain, within one year from the date of hire, the following clearance(s):
Fitness - DHSSalary compensation range and midpoint:
$162,400 - $203,000 - $243,600 AnnualWork Location Type:
OnsiteCommitment to Non-Discrimination
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, local or international law.
MITRE intends to maintain a website that is fully accessible to all individuals. If you are unable to search or apply for jobs and would like to request a reasonable accommodation for any part of MITRE’s employment process, please email recruitinghelp@mitre.org for general support and collegerecruiting@mitre.org for intern positions. This service is for individuals requiring reasonable accommodation requests. Please note that vendor solicitations will not receive a reply.
Benefits information may be found here.
Copyright © 1997-2026, The MITRE Corporation. All rights reserved. MITRE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. Material on this site may be copied and distributed with permission only.MITRE's Advanced Wireless & SATCOM Department, within the Infrastructure, Networking, and Communications Division, provides independent communications engineering, network architecture, and technical analysis in support of critical national missions. We seek a senior technical leader with deep, practical telecommunications backbone and carrier-core experience to help federal cybersecurity and critical-infrastructure partners understand how diverse telecom networks are built, interconnected, operated, monitored, and defended. This position emphasizes mission-driven engineering analysis, technical leadership, and trusted-advisor support across legacy and modern telecommunications systems.
Roles & Responsibilities:
-
Serve as a senior technical advisor on telecommunications carrier core, backbone, transport, and service architectures in support of cybersecurity, infrastructure defense, and mission assurance activities.
-
Characterize end-to-end fixed & mobile telecom architectures, including signaling, control & user planes, network functions, interconnects, routing, management systems, and network visibility points.
-
Partner with cyber analysts and threat hunting teams to turn mission questions into technically sound hypotheses, telecom-specific analysis methods, applicable telemetry sources, and practical findings, highlighting gaps and limitations in visibility.
-
Assess telecommunications network security, service dependencies, fault & failure modes, resilience, and attack surfaces and recommend engineering mitigations and testable approaches grounded in actual carrier network behavior.
-
Shape and support collaborative government-industry technical pilots and COOP activities, including PACE communications planning and alternative transport & service approaches.
-
Develop and independently review system and reference architectures, interface & dataflow diagrams, technical trade studies, analysis reports, integration plans, and briefings that prioritize actions and make informed decisions.
- Collaborate directly with federal mission stakeholders, telecom operators, equipment vendors, and multidisciplinary engineering teams to reconcile requirements, validate technical assumptions, and communicate recommendations clearly.
Basic Qualifications:
-
Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline with 10 years of related experience; or Master’s with 7 years; or PhD with 5 years; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.
-
Substantial direct, hands-on experience engineering, architecting, integrating, troubleshooting, or technically assessing production-scale carrier telecommunications networks and their operational behavior.
-
Demonstrated end-to-end understanding of carrier-grade telecommunications infrastructure beyond 5G radio access, including core network functions, IP transport & routing, signaling & interconnection, and the relationship between network elements, services, and operational telemetry.
-
Ability to analyze complex communications architectures and identify network dependencies, technical risks, network behavior, and security & monitoring opportunities across heterogeneous legacy and modern systems.
-
Experience developing technically sound architecture assessments, problem analyses, trade studies, or engineering recommendations that inform operational or programmatic decisions.
-
Demonstrated senior technical leadership and ability to work effectively across engineering teams, government stakeholders, and industry partners.
-
Ability to obtain and maintain the personnel suitability and access determinations required for assigned federal sponsor work.
-
Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a DHS Fitness clearance. Per the U.S. Government’s eligibility requirements, you must be a U.S Citizen to be considered for a security clearance.
- This position requires a minimum of 3 days a week on-site.
Preferred Qualifications:
-
Direct engineering experience with multiple generations of commercial mobile-core or fixed telecom networks, such as LTE & 5G, EPC & 5GC, IMS, Diameter, and associated roaming & interconnect architectures.
-
Experience with large-scale IP, MPLS, BGP, optical transport, DCI, and carrier operations & support systems and ability to explain how these components interact.
-
Hands-on experience with telecommunications threat hunting, network security analysis, incident investigation, protocol & packet inspection, or mapping threats to carrier network elements and exploitable visibility & detection points.
-
Experience with communications resiliency and COOP analysis, including critical infrastructure dependencies, failure propagation, alternate communications pathways, and PACE planning.
-
Experience supporting government-industry technical pilots, multistakeholder reference architectures, and evaluations of various telecom technologies.
-
Prior work with telecommunications carriers, major network equipment suppliers, critical infrastructure operators, or federal mission sponsors in a senior technical advisor or chief architect role.
- Existing sponsor suitability determination or prior experience onboarding to federal civilian mission environments, with the ability to engage effectively in time-sensitive sponsor work.
This requisition requires the candidate to have a minimum of the following clearance(s):
This requisition requires the hired candidate to have or obtain, within one year from the date of hire, the following clearance(s):
Fitness - DHSSalary compensation range and midpoint:
$162,400 - $203,000 - $243,600 AnnualWork Location Type:
OnsiteCommitment to Non-Discrimination
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, local or international law.
MITRE intends to maintain a website that is fully accessible to all individuals. If you are unable to search or apply for jobs and would like to request a reasonable accommodation for any part of MITRE’s employment process, please email recruitinghelp@mitre.org for general support and collegerecruiting@mitre.org for intern positions. This service is for individuals requiring reasonable accommodation requests. Please note that vendor solicitations will not receive a reply.
Benefits information may be found here.
Copyright © 1997-2026, The MITRE Corporation. All rights reserved. MITRE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. Material on this site may be copied and distributed with permission only.See All 24 Principal Network Architect Jobs
Find roles that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find JobsPrincipal Network Architect Job Market
Who's Hiring
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software
What Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in principal network architect jobs.
- Ten or more years of hands-on network engineering and architecture experience
- Active CCIE, JNCIE, or equivalent advanced vendor certification
- Deep expertise in SD-WAN, BGP routing, and large-scale data center design
- Experience architecting zero-trust network access and cloud-native security frameworks
- Proficiency with automation and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or Python
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related technical field
Tips for Your Principal Network Architect Job Search
Quantify network scale on your resume
Hiring managers for principal-level roles want to see the actual scope you've owned: number of nodes managed, throughput handled, or uptime SLAs you engineered for. Replace vague phrases like 'large enterprise networks' with concrete figures from your experience.
List vendor certifications above your degree
For principal network architect roles, a current CCIE, JNCIE, or equivalent active certification often carries more weight than your degree title. Place it in its own section at the top of your resume so recruiters spot it before they read anything else.
Apply early to roles that fit
Migrate Mate lists principal network architect openings from across the United States in one place, so you can find roles that match and apply directly to each listing.
Target postings that name specific platforms
Job descriptions that call out Cisco ACI, Juniper Apstra, or VMware NSX tell you the actual environment you'd own. Filter for those specific tool names when searching so your application directly mirrors the stack the team already runs.
Prepare a whiteboard architecture story
Principal architect interviews almost always include a live design exercise. Practice walking through a full network topology decision out loud, explaining your trade-offs on redundancy, latency, and security segmentation before you're ever in the room.
Negotiate scope before you negotiate compensation
At the principal level, your offer often has room to move on the technical roadmap you'd own, reporting structure, and budget authority. Clarifying those before you discuss compensation gives you a clearer picture of the role's actual value and your leverage.
Principal Network Architect Jobs: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies are hiring the most principal network architects?
The most active employers for principal network architects right now are NCR, Brightspeed, and RTX, and the most openings are in California, Virginia, and Maryland, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Defense contractors, hyperscale cloud providers, and large financial institutions consistently post the highest volumes of principal-level architecture roles.
How many principal network architect jobs are remote?
About 73% of principal network architect openings are fully remote or hybrid as of November 2026, though fully on-site roles remain common in regulated industries like defense and banking. Sub-specializations in cloud network architecture and SD-WAN design tend to be the most remote-friendly, while roles tied to physical data center buildouts or government facility networks are more likely to require on-site presence.
How do you become a principal network architect?
Start by building deep expertise in core routing, switching, and security protocols as a network engineer, then move into senior engineer roles where you own full network designs rather than individual configurations. Earning an advanced vendor certification like a CCIE validates your technical depth to hiring managers. From there, taking on cross-functional architecture projects and mentoring junior engineers positions you for the principal title.
Can you get hired as a principal network architect without prior principal-level experience?
Yes, candidates who have functioned at the principal level without the title can make a strong case by documenting the actual scope of their work: designs they owned end to end, stakeholders they advised, and infrastructure decisions they drove independently. Highlighting a specific complex migration or greenfield architecture project in your resume and interview is more persuasive than years-of-experience counts alone.
What does the principal network architect interview process look like?
Most processes start with a recruiter screen focused on your certifications and overall scope of past work, followed by a technical phone or video interview covering protocol knowledge and design principles. A live or take-home architecture design exercise is nearly universal at the principal level, where you're expected to walk through trade-offs out loud. Final rounds typically involve conversations with engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders who assess your ability to influence technical direction.
Where can I find and apply to principal network architect jobs?
You can find and apply to principal network architect jobs on Migrate Mate, which lists current openings from across the United States. Search for roles that match your specialization and experience level, then apply directly to each listing that fits.
See All 24 Principal Network Architect Jobs
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