Talkdesk is pioneering a new era of Customer Experience Automation (CXA), redefining how the world’s most admired brands interact with their customers through AI. Our global team of courageous innovators is customer-obsessed, building AI-first solutions that put empathy, trust, and transparency at the center of every interaction. We foster an inclusive culture where diverse perspectives drive our success and every voice belongs. Combining the stability of a global leader with the agility of a disruptor, Talkdeskers are empowered with the autonomy to drive meaningful impact, while giving back to the communities and environment around us.

Talkdesk has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and in the G2 Overall Grid® Reports for AI Agents and Contact Center. With seven consecutive years on the Forbes Cloud 100 and multiple AI Breakthrough awards, there has never been a more exciting time to join us as we shape the future of customer experience automation!

The SRE Connectivity team at Talkdesk builds, operates, and evolves the infrastructure foundation that supports all engineering teams. We work with an automation-first mindset and prioritize availability, reliability, and scalability at global scale.

As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a senior technical authority for network and SRE infrastructure. You will shape architecture, drive engineering standards, and lead complex initiatives across a large, distributed, multi-region, multi-cloud environment. This role is deeply hands-on and focused on solving hard infrastructure problems at scale.
At Talkdesk, we follow a “you build it, you own it” philosophy. You will help reinforce that culture by designing platforms and guardrails that empower teams to operate safely in production, fostering a blameless, learning-driven engineering environment.

What you will do:

• Architect and evolve core network infrastructure and shared SRE platforms used company-wide

• Lead design and implementation of large-scale infrastructure initiatives

• Stay deeply hands-on: contribute code, automation, and infrastructure changes

• Establish technical standards, patterns, and best practices across teams

• Drive automation-first operations and eliminate manual, error-prone workflows

• Improve reliability through strong observability, monitoring, and proactive detection

• Design tooling and platforms that enable teams to safely run production workloads

• Participate in on-call rotation and remain close to real production challenges

• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for complex system failures

• Act as a technical mentor and multiplier for senior engineers

• Influence cross-team architecture and long-term infrastructure strategy

Required experience

• Strong hands-on AWS networking experience

• Practical experience configuring and operating AWS Direct Connect

• Hands-on experience with Fortinet firewalls and security products

• Experience with Net Box or similar network source-of-truth platforms

• Deep Linux/Unix systems knowledge

• Strong programming/scripting skills (Python, Bash, or similar)

• Infrastructure as Code expertise (Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent)

• Experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible

• Familiarity with monitoring and observability platforms (Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, etc.)

• Proven ability to design automation for complex infrastructure workflows

• Advanced troubleshooting skills in distributed systems

• Pragmatic engineering mindset with strong critical thinking

Nice to have

• Experience supporting large-scale production systems

• Exposure to Docker, Consul, Vault, Jenkins, Concourse, Prometheus, Nexus

• Experience with encryption, secrets, and key management (ACM, KMS, hashing)

• Experience with additional firewall or network security platforms

• Multi-cloud experience (GCP, Azure)

• Previous experience acting as a principal/staff-level technical leader

Work Environment and Physical Requirements:

Primarily office-environment work, extended periods of sitting or standing, computer-based work. Limited lifting, and equipment usage limited to computer-related equipment (keyboards, mouse, etc.)

The Talkdesk story hinges on empathy and acceptance. It is the shared goal among all Talkdeskers to empower a new kind of customer hero through our innovative software solution, and we firmly believe that the best path to success for our mission is inclusivity, diversity, and genuine acceptance. To that end, we will hire, promote, work along, cheer for, bond with, and warmly welcome into the Talkdesk family all persons without regard to ethnic and racial identity, indigenous heritage, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, marital status, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status.