Principal Network Systems Engineer

About this role

// About Providius Providius has been at the forefront of innovation in the Media & Entertainment industry for over a decade, delivering solutions to complex challenges involving IP media and IT infrastructure in high-stakes, mission-critical environments. Headquartered in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, we are a privately held company focused on building practical, reliable products and solutions that “just make sense.” Our team works closely with customers and technical partners to address evolving operational challenges. We take a hands-on, customer-focused approach and build technology that helps organizations better understand, operate, and trust complex networked systems. Description // What We’re Looking For Providius is looking for a deeply hands-on Principal Network Systems Engineer to become a trusted technical authority on real-world network behaviour, device communication, system configuration, and complex failure modes. We need someone who truly understands how devices communicate across a network, how networked systems are configured and operated in practice, what can go wrong, what evidence to look for, and how to diagnose and reproduce difficult technical problems. This person will help us build representative network environments, characterize expected system behaviour, reproduce faults and configuration changes, identify meaningful technical signals, and work closely with engineering teams to ensure our products and systems are grounded in real-world network behaviour. This is not a people-management role, a traditional enterprise IT role, or a primarily architectural position. We are looking for someone who enjoys working directly with switches, endpoints, traffic, packet captures, telemetry, configurations, and real technical problems. // Position Overview You will work closely with engineering, product leadership, and customer-facing teams. A major part of the role will be building and operating practical test environments that reflect how real customers and industries deploy networked systems. You will help define representative configurations, operational scenarios, failure conditions, and technical validation requirements. You will configure systems, generate controlled faults, investigate packet and telemetry behaviour, document findings, and help our teams understand the technical reality behind the systems they are building. You will act as a senior individual contributor and technical authority. You will advise the VP of Engineering, product management, and engineering teams, but you will not be expected to own the product roadmap or manage a team. The ideal candidate is curious, practical, technically confident, and comfortable moving between hands-on troubleshooting, system design, testing, documentation, and technical guidance. // Duties and Responsibilities Build, configure, and maintain representative networked lab and test environments for product development, technical investigation, validation, and demonstration. Configure and troubleshoot switches, routers, endpoints, VLANs, multicast, QoS, routing, timing systems, traffic flows, and other relevant networked systems. Reproduce realistic operational scenarios, including configuration changes, device replacement, packet loss, timing faults, multicast issues, unexpected traffic patterns, congestion, misrouting, firmware differences, degraded performance, and device failures. Identify how different devices and systems behave during normal operation, failure, recovery, failover, reconfiguration, and other operational changes. Capture and interpret packets, flow data, device telemetry, logs, configurations, monitoring data, timing information, and other technical signals. Determine which technical signals are meaningful for identifying, reproducing, and explaining system behaviour. Maintain structured documentation of system behaviours, recurring issues, configurations, test scenarios, observable evidence, likely causes, and technical findings. Define realistic test conditions, expected outcomes, validation criteria, and representative operational scenarios. Work closely with software, data, and engineering teams to ensure technical environments, test scenarios, and system observations are accurate, representative, and usable. Review technical findings and system outputs to determine whether they are consistent with real-world network behaviour. Design representative lab topologies based on how customers and industries actually deploy and operate networked systems. Identify technical assumptions, edge cases, data limitations, blind spots, and failure modes early. Provide technical guidance and recommendations to engineering, product management, and company leadership. Participate in selected customer discovery, technical demonstrations, pilots, and field validation where deep network expertise is required. Clearly document environments, configurations, scenarios, test conditions, observations, telemetry sources, expected behaviour, and findings. Support the development of technical requirements by explaining what is technically possible, measurable, reproducible, and useful. Use scripting, APIs, automation, or data-processing tools where useful, while working closely with other technical staff for more advanced implementation. Requirements Requirements // Required Skills / Experience 7+ years of hands-on experience in network engineering, network systems engineering, systems integration, network validation, network performance, field engineering, escalation engineering, or a closely related technical role. Deep practical understanding of switching, routing, VLANs, multicast, QoS, traffic flows, packet behaviour, and network troubleshooting. Strong hands-on experience configuring, operating, and diagnosing switches, endpoints, networked devices, and supporting infrastructure. Demonstrated ability to investigate difficult network and system problems using packet captures, telemetry, logs, configurations, flow data