Principal Network Systems Engineer

// 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, monitoring tools, and direct testing.
• Experience building, maintaining, or troubleshooting lab, test, validation, integration, staging, customer, or field environments.
• Strong understanding of how device behaviour, configuration, firmware, timing, traffic patterns, and network state affect system operation.
• Ability to reproduce technical problems and create controlled test scenarios.
• Ability to distinguish symptoms, evidence, root causes, contributing conditions, and remediation steps.
• Ability to characterize expected system behaviour, operational changes, failure conditions, and edge cases.
• Ability to translate real-world system behaviour into clear scenarios, observations, test conditions, and validation requirements.
• Strong practical judgment and the ability to distinguish between what is theoretically possible, what is observable, what is reproducible, and what is useful.
• Ability to work independently, organize ambiguity, ask strong technical questions, and maintain forward progress without a fully defined roadmap.
• Confidence acting as a technical authority and clearly communicating recommendations to engineers, product managers, and company leadership.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfortable working closely with software engineering, data, product, and customer-facing teams.
• Strong interest in hands-on technical investigation and a willingness to remain directly involved with equipment, configurations, testing, and troubleshooting.

// Relevant Domain Experience

Strong candidates may come from one or more of the following environments:

• Broadcast, media, or AV-over-IP systems
• Network equipment manufacturing or validation
• Telecom or carrier networks
• Data centre or high-performance network environments
• Industrial networking or operational technology
• Critical infrastructure
• Financial or other low-latency network environments
• Network monitoring, observability, or performance analytics
• Field engineering, professional services, or technical escalation
• Systems integration and interoperability testing
• Mission-critical or compliance-driven technical environments

Experience with one or more of the following is highly desirable:

• SMPTE ST 2110, ST 2022-7, AES67, Dante, NDI, or related media transport technologies
• PTP / IEEE 1588, NTP, timing distribution, synchronization, or clock behaviour
• Packet capture and packet analysis
• NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, SNMP, streaming telemetry, logs, metrics, or infrastructure monitoring
• Multicast routing, IGMP, PIM, QoS, VLANs, switching, routing, and traffic engineering
• High-throughput, real-time, or low-latency networks
• Modbus, DNP3, EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, or other operational technology protocols
• Network performance, observability, SIEM, infrastructure analytics, or monitoring platforms
• Device interoperability, firmware validation, lab testing, customer pilots, or field troubleshooting

Broadcast or media experience is not required. Deep technical experience in another complex networked or operational technology environment is equally relevant.

// Nice to Haves

• Experience working with advanced analytics, data science, or machine learning teams.
• Experience defining technical datasets, test scenarios, validation criteria, telemetry schemas, or structured system observations.
• Ability to use Python, APIs, scripting, automation, notebooks, SQL, or data-processing tools.
• Experience transforming, inspecting, or validating technical data.
• Experience working with both on-premise and cloud-connected systems.
• Experience with network automation or configuration management.
• Experience working in a smaller company, early-stage product environment, or situation where requirements are still being defined.
• Ability to contribute to product discussions and identify technically valuable customer use cases.
• Experience presenting technical findings to leadership, customers, or cross-functional teams.
• Familiarity with agile delivery, product discovery, or backlog development.

// What Success Looks Like

• You become the company’s trusted technical authority on real-world network communication, device behaviour, system state, and failure modes.
• You build representative network environments that reflect how real customers and industries configure and operate their systems.
• You create clear, structured documentation of expected behaviours, operational changes, recurring issues, failure conditions, observable evidence, and technical findings.
• You can deliberately reproduce problems, explain what happened, identify which signals reveal the problem, and define how the scenario should be tested and validated.
• You help engineering and product teams avoid unrealistic assumptions and make better technical decisions.
• You provide clear, confident technical guidance to the VP of Engineering, product management, engineering, and customer-facing teams.
• You create clarity where there is ambiguity and turn complex system behaviour into practical, usable technical knowledge.
• Your work directly improves the technical accuracy, reliability, and usefulness of Providius products.

// Why Join Providius

• Become the technical authority in an important area of the company.
• Work directly with complex networked systems, real equipment, real traffic, and meaningful technical problems.
• Build representative systems, reproduce failures, and help ensure products reflect how networks and devices actually behave.
• Work closely with company leadership, engineering, product, and customer-facing teams.
• Join a small, experienced company where your technical judgment will have a direct impact.
• Help shape new products for mission-critical networked environments.
• Work on practical technology where reliability, visibility, and operational trust matter.

Benefits

• Dental care
• Extended health care
• On-site parking
• Paid time off
• Vision care