Internet Services

Principal Engineer

Reston, VAHybridFull TimePrincipal$180,700–$244,500 /yrPosted 1 month agoVisa sponsorship available

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Required skills

BGP-4
eBGP
iBGP
Route Reflectors
Confederations
BGP Communities
Large Communities
Flowspec
ASPA
IPv4

Nice to have

CCNP Service Provider
CCIE Service Provider
JNCIP-SP
JNCIE-SP
AWS Advanced Networking Specialty
RPKI Deployment

Role summary

Verisign is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead its global Internet interconnection strategy. This role involves developing and executing strategies for peering, IP transit, and Internet Exchange participation to enhance network performance, reduce costs, and increase resiliency. The ideal candidate will have extensive technical networking expertise, strong business negotiation skills, and experience managing relationships with network operators, content providers, and cloud providers. Responsibilities include negotiating agreements, managing global transit providers, optimizing traffic flows, and engaging with industry forums. This hybrid position is based in Reston, VA, with a salary range of $180,700 - $244,500.

Verisign helps enable the security, stability, and resiliency of the internet. We are a trusted provider of internet infrastructure services for the networked world and deliver unmatched performance in domain name system (DNS) services.

We are a mission focused, values driven company where each individual can contribute to building a stronger, more secure internet. We offer a dynamic and flexible work environment with competitive benefits and the ability to grow your career.

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.

Verisign is an equal opportunity employer. That means we recruit, hire, compensate, train, promote, transfer, and administer all terms and conditions of employment without regard to their race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, protected veteran status, disability, or other protected categories under applicable law.

Additional Information:Our Careers PageOur Benefits SummaryVerisign in the CommunityOur EEO StatementOur Privacy Notice for Job Applicants/CandidatesReasonable Accommodations

Staffing agency policy: No fees will be paid for unsolicited resumes submitted to Verisign or our employees by third parties.

Sample Verisign interview questions

1
Palindrome After Deleting One Character Determine if a string can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character. Input: s = "abc" Output: FALSE Explanation: Deleting any single character leaves either "ab", "bc", or "ac", none of which result in a valid palindrome.
codingmedium
2
Merge a New Interval Merge a new interval into a list of non-overlapping intervals. Input: intervals = [[1,2],[3,5],[6,7],[8,10],[12,16]], newInterval = [4,8] Output: [[1,2],[3,10],[12,16]] Explanation: The new interval overlaps with [3,5], [6,7], and [8,10], merging them all into the unified block [3,10].
codingmedium
3
Connected Components in an Undirected Graph Determine the number of connected components in an undirected graph. Input: n = 4, edges = [[0,1],[2,3]] Output: 2 Explanation: The graph is split completely evenly into two distinct isolated components: nodes {0,1} and nodes {2,3}.
codingmedium
4
Implement String Compression Implement string compression. Input: chars = ["a","b","b","b","b","b","b","b","b","b","b","b","b"] Output: ["a","b","1","2"] Explanation: The letter 'a' appears once (so no number is appended), and 'b' appears 12 times, modifying the array in place to length 4.
codingmedium
5
Product of Array Except Self Calculate the product of an array except for self without using division. Input: nums = [-1,1,0,-3,3] Output: [0,0,9,0,0] Explanation: The single zero zeros out all products except at its own index, which cleanly multiplies the remaining elements.
codingmedium

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