Senior Data Center Network Engineer - AI/HPC Infrastructure

Workplace Type: On-site Employment Type: FTE Salary: $210,000–$240,000 base salary, plus equity and benefits Note: No C2C arrangements will be considered. Any attempt to use personal or household contact information for solicitation, candidate submission, or vendor outreach is strictly prohibited and will be reported to LinkedIn. Build and help define the network foundation behind a high-performance AI platform supporting GPU infrastructure, distributed compute, real-time analytics, and mission-critical enterprise workloads. This is a network engineering role first . We are looking for a deeply hands-on senior engineer with Staff-level ownership who has designed and operated modern data center networks using BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, spine-leaf architectures, ECMP, WAN connectivity, and network automation. This role requires more than implementing an established architecture. You should be comfortable taking an incomplete infrastructure problem, determining the actual requirements, evaluating technical and cost tradeoffs, designing the solution, and carrying it through implementation and production operation. General SRE, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, or Kubernetes experience without significant production network architecture depth will not be sufficient for this position. What You’ll Own Architect and operate secure, high-performance data center and edge networks supporting AI and distributed compute workloads. Translate loosely defined infrastructure needs into technical requirements, architecture decisions, implementation plans, and operational standards. Design, configure, and troubleshoot spine-leaf fabrics using BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, and ECMP. Own WAN and LAN transit networks, backhaul connectivity, switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPNs, carrier circuits, and external peering. Work directly with carriers and colocation providers on circuit provisioning, cross-connects, path diversity, testing, migration, and production acceptance. Make network architecture decisions involving resilience, performance, capacity, security, operational complexity, and cost. Evaluate and implement security policies, including segmentation, application firewall capabilities, packet inspection, and IPsec/VPN connectivity. Help transition network infrastructure toward secure directory-based authentication and individual administrative accountability. Automate network configuration, validation, deployment, and operational workflows. Manage network addressing, inventory, capacity, and configuration through IPAM/DCIM platforms. Troubleshoot complex performance and connectivity issues across network devices, Linux systems, compute infrastructure, and production services. Drive root-cause analysis and systemic remediation for recurring network issues rather than relying solely on monitoring and alerting. Improve observability, incident response, documentation, operational readiness, and network standards. Partner directly with infrastructure, engineering, data science, security, and other technical teams. Participate in on-call responsibilities and remain hands-on from physical infrastructure through network architecture and production troubleshooting. Required Network Expertise Eight or more years of network, data center infrastructure, or closely related engineering experience. At least five years of hands-on data center network engineering or administration. Demonstrated ownership of production network architecture , not solely implementation of designs created by another team. Experience taking infrastructure requirements from an incomplete or ambiguous starting point through design, implementation, and production operation. Production expertise with BGP and routing policy . Strong experience with modern spine-leaf network architecture. Hands-on experience with EVPN/VXLAN and ECMP . Strong Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking fundamentals. Strong experience configuring and troubleshooting switches, routers, firewalls, and load balancers. Experience with WAN circuits, carrier provisioning, backhaul connectivity, VPNs, and external peering. Knowledge of MPLS, QoS, IPsec, network security, capacity planning, and failure-domain design. Experience with NetBox, Infoblox, Nautobot, or another IPAM/DCIM or network source-of-truth platform. Network automation experience using Ansible, Nornir, Python, Terraform, Jinja2, APIs, or similar technologies. Strong Linux and network troubleshooting skills. Demonstrated ability to investigate recurring outages, determine root cause, identify architectural fragility, and implement lasting corrective action. Ability to operate autonomously in an environment where requirements may not already be fully defined. Strong judgment around when to solve independently and when to escalate or bring in another specialist. What Staff-Level Ownership Looks Like Here The strongest candidates will be able to point to examples where they personally: Took an ambiguous networking or infrastructure problem and established the requirements. Designed the architecture rather than only implementing someone else's design. Owned a significant network environment or problem space end to end. Made technical tradeoffs involving reliability, performance, security, scalability, and cost. Diagnosed repeated failures and corrected the underlying system or architecture. Established network standards, automation, tooling, or operational practices used by others. Worked across network, systems, security, cloud, storage, or compute boundaries when needed to solve the actual problem. Stayed hands-on after making the architecture decision. A strong Senior Engineer may still be considered, but this role is best suited to someone already demonstrating Staff-level scope, autonomy, and architecture ownership . These Skills Are a Plus InfiniBand networking for GPU or HPC environments RDMA or RoCEv2 networking, including PFC, ECN, congestion management, and performance validation GPU cluster, HPC, or AI/ML infrastructure experience NVIDIA networking technologies or other high-performance network fabrics Kubernetes networking, including CNI, ingress, service networking, and network policy High-throughput or distributed storage networking, including NFS, Lustre, Ceph, BeeGFS, NVMe-oF, or iSCSI Hybrid cloud networking across AWS, Azure, or GCP Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, OpenTelemetry, or similar observability platforms Experience with colocation environments such as Equinix Experience building or expanding physical data center environments Experience in a startup or rapidly scaling technical environment Experience supporting SOC 2 or other high-compliance environments The Environment This is a startup environment where the right answer may not already be documented. You should be comfortable: Asking the questions necessary to establish requirements Making cost-conscious technical tradeoffs Moving between architecture and hands-on implementation Working through unfamiliar infrastructure problems Managing escalations without immediately handing problems off Collaborating across technical domains Learning new technologies quickly when the problem requires it We are looking for someone who sees an undefined infrastructure problem and thinks, “I'll figure out what we need and build it,” rather than waiting for someone else to provide the complete architecture. Employment and Work Authorization Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future employer sponsorship. This opportunity does not support C2C arrangements, agencies, or third-party candidate submissions. #J-18808-Ljbffr Stratitech