Staff Network Engineer

AI Fabrik builds an edge inference delivery network for high-performance tokens, with faster time-to-market from grid to tokens. Our mission is to build the inference infrastructure we wished every enterprise already had — close to users, close to the cloud, and extremely resilient for real‑time workloads. We are builders, architects, engineers, and researchers with hands‑on experience in real‑world AI deployment in production, and decades of data center experience that taught us exactly what needs to change. AI Fabrik was incubated inside Gruve and backed by Mayfield, Xora (Temasek), Acclimate Ventures, Cisco Investments — existing investors from Gruve who followed us into this new chapter. We are deploying five initial production sites, with the first one coming online in July 2026. About the Role We're looking for a Staff Edge Network Engineer to own how inference traffic from across the internet reaches our data center sites — securely, and with the lowest possible latency. This is a senior individual‑contributor role with deep technical authority across the infrastructure organization. Key Responsibilities Edge Architecture & Traffic Management Architect global traffic steering and failover across data center sites using provider DNS and load balancing, with health checks and geo/latency awareness Design how Cloudflare and Akamai or similar front our inference service — selecting and configuring the right products for anycast ingress, security, and low‑latency routing Apply provider middle‑mile optimization (e.g., Cloudflare Argo, Akamai mapping) to accelerate dynamic requests Configure TLS/QUIC termination at the edge, including certificate lifecycle management and and Balance Cloudflare and Akamai or similar capabilities, including multi‑provider resilience where it reduces risk. Edge‑to‑Site Integration Design and operate connectivity between the provider edge and our sites — GRE/IPsec and private interconnect on‑ramps (e.g., Cloudflare Network Interconnect) and, where applicable, L3 prefix protection (Cloudflare Magic Transit, Akamai Prolexic) Own BGP at the site edge and the routing path into our inference clusters Cloak and lock down origin to accept provider traffic only — SiteShield, Authenticated Origin Pulls, Cloudflare Tunnel, mTLS, and IP allow‑listing Deliver non‑ traffic (gRPC, TCP/UDP, WebSocket) through the edge — e.g., Cloudflare Spectrum — and tune proxy behavior (timeouts, buffering, connection reuse) for long‑lived, streaming inference connections Partner with data center network and platform teams on capacity‑aware ingress at each site Edge Security Design and operate layered DDoS protection (L3/L4 and L7) and rate limiting through the providers Own WAF, bot management, and API protection, tuning rules to balance protection against false positives on legitimate traffic Define the edge trust boundary and threat model for our inference endpoints with security teams Adapt protections during active attacks and as the threat landscape evolves Operations & Automation Manage all edge configuration as code — Cloudflare and Akamai Terraform providers, GitOps, and CI/CD with automated validation and safe rollout Integrate provider telemetry (logs, analytics, RUM) with our monitoring, tracking latency SLOs and end‑to‑end performance Participate in on‑call and lead incident response for edge, routing, and origin‑connectivity events, driving postmortems to resolution Own capacity planning across ingress paths, and manage vendor relationships, escalations, and roadmap alignment Maintain runbooks, validated configurations, and operational documentation Basic Qualifications 10+ years in network engineering, with deep, hands‑on production expertise using Cloudflare and/or Akamai for edge security and traffic management Strong command of edge security — DDoS mitigation, WAF, bot management, rate limiting, API protection, and TLS termination Proven experience integrating a managed edge or scrubbing provider with data center origins, including secured, cloaked origin connectivity Expert‑level BGP at the site/origin edge — eBGP, route policy, prefix advertisement, and DIA/transit integration Global traffic management using provider DNS and load balancing for geo/latency steering and health‑based failover Experience operating a production internet‑facing service, including on‑call, incident response, and capacity planning Strong automation skills — Python (or Go) and Terraform for edge, DNS, and network configuration Ability to set technical direction and raise the engineering bar across teams as a senior IC Preferred Qualifications Cloudflare or Akamai certifications, or experience onboarding an organization onto either platform Hands‑on experience across Cloudflare (Magic Transit, Spectrum, Load Balancing, CNI, API Shield) and Akamai (Prolexic, App & API Protector, GTM, SiteShield, Edge DNS) Experience designing multi‑provider failover and resilience Familiarity with AI inference traffic patterns — streaming (SSE/WebSocket), gRPC, and long‑lived connections — and their interaction with edge proxying QUIC/ and modern TLS/mTLS practices BYOIP and RPKI/ROV for owned prefixes Experience leading DDoS incident response at scale Salary Range Why AI Fabrik At AI Fabrik, we hire for impact. We want those who challenge how inference infrastructure is built and who excel at delivering it in production. We are builders, architects, engineers, and researchers. We move fast, work with rigor, and care deeply about what runs in the real world. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. AI Fabrik is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and thank all who apply; however, only those selected for an interview will be contacted. Please note that this is an onsite position based out of AI Fabrik’s Redwood City, California office. #J-18808-Ljbffr