How To Become A Principal Network Engineer: What It Is and Career Path

What is a principal network engineer and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

4 min read

Quoted expert

Dr. Wayne Wakeland Ph.D.

As the principal network engineer, you will lead a team of network engineers. You are accountable for the design, construction, and safeguarding of the networks of your clients. With your team of network engineers, you will assess your client's system requirements and design a network that fits their specifications.

Your responsibility as the principal network engineer may further be extended to the training of new network engineers. You will also walk your clients through how you and your team intend to construct their network, responding to any queries they may have. With every project, you will be expected to draw up a report detailing how you successfully executed the task, resolve issues, and how you would execute future projects of similar nature.

In order to become a principal network engineer, you will require a variety of technical and leadership skills. You need to have advanced knowledge of the designing and implementation of networks and be equipped with the diagnostic skills to identify your client's needs.

To venture into this career, you need to have obtained a bachelor's degree in computer science and have gained appropriate experience in the IT industry to eventually land a principal network engineer position.

What general advice would you give to a principal network engineer?

Dr. Wayne Wakeland Ph.D.

Professor and Systems Science Program Chair, Portland State University

Develop a thoughtful combination of technical skills/expertise and qualitative resources/assets/prowess. Purely technical savvy can go a long way, but it is not enough. Employers are eager to hire well-rounded, easy to work with employees and leaders who can go deeper technically as required.

ScorePrincipal Network EngineerUS Average

Salary

7.9

Avg. Salary $112,094

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

5.7

Growth rate 5%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

3.7

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.31%

Asian 11.15%

Black or African American 8.68%

Hispanic or Latino 12.37%

Unknown 5.07%

White 62.43%

Gender

female 6.52%

male 93.48%

Age - 42

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 42

Stress level

5.7

Stress level is manageable

7.1 - high

Complexity level

6.7

Complexity level is challenging

7 - challenging

Work life balance

7.1

Work life balance is good

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a principal network engineer

Explore principal network engineer education requirements

Most common principal network engineer degrees

Bachelor's

69.6 %

Master's

13.6 %

Associate

12.4 %

Start to develop specific principal network engineer skills

Skills	Percentages
Linux	6.04%
Lan Wan	5.65%
Network Infrastructure	5.63%
VPN	5.46%
Network Performance	4.56%

Complete relevant principal network engineer training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 3-6 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New principal network engineers learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a principal network engineer based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real principal network engineer resumes.

Research principal network engineer duties and responsibilities

Lead SIGTRAN (SS7 over IP) software porting and system integration on Linux.
Lead architecture and design sessions with customers; initiate technical meetings with customer engineers to further engage and identify additional opportunities.
Perform all engineering duties including test and turn up of all WAN/LAN/WLAN & VoIP LAN for each office space.
Used Simena traffic emulators to stress test network equipment by pushing multi-protocol data frames including BGP routing protocols and IPv6.

Get principal network engineer experience

Generally, it takes 1-2 years to become a principal network engineer. The most common roles before becoming a principal network engineer include senior network engineer, network engineer team lead and systems engineer.

Prepare your principal network engineer resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your principal network engineer resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on a principal network engineer resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

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