Staff Networking Platform Engineer, Infrastructure

Mission

We’re looking for a network engineer with deep data center and Kubernetes networking experience to own networking across GroqMetal’s management plane and tenant clusters.

You will own network architecture, configuration, security, and production operations—from host and cluster networking through data center fabrics to edge peering and interconnects. You’ll manage changes through fabric managers, automation, and GitOps, backed by a detailed understanding of the protocols, packet paths, and failure behavior underneath them.

You’ll turn customer connectivity, isolation, and performance requirements into managed platform capabilities. Success means customers can provision and use networking reliably, tenant boundaries are demonstrably enforced, and network changes and failures can be diagnosed and resolved without reconstructing the system by hand.

Responsibilities & opportunities in this role

• Networking product capabilities: Translate customer connectivity, isolation, access, and performance requirements into supported platform features. Define how those features are requested, provisioned, changed, observed, and removed throughout their lifecycle.
• Tenant and node network lifecycle: Build Kubernetes-native automation to create, modify, and remove tenant networks and manage node membership through provisioning, scaling, repair, replacement, and reassignment. Verify isolation and connectivity at each transition, recover safely from partial failures, and remove stale configuration before resources are reassigned.
• Data center routing and connectivity: Own dynamic configuration of tenant networks, BGP, routing policy, VLANs, and overlays across management, tenant, and external networks. Build Kubernetes-native automation to provision and manage these capabilities through fabric-manager APIs, including customer service exposure, ingress/egress, VIPs, load balancers, and public IPs. Validate convergence, failover, reachability, and isolation.
• Kubernetes networking: Own networking for the Groq management plane and tenant clusters, including Cilium, network policy, service routing, ingress, egress, and integration with bare-metal networks.
• GPU networking: Automate tenant configuration and lifecycle operations for GPU networking, including NVL72 systems, InfiniBand, RoCE, and GPUDirect, through supported platform and fabric-management interfaces. Validate connectivity, isolation, and performance as tenant allocations and node membership change.
• Addressing and fabric integration: Own dynamic address allocation, network inventory integration, and tenant network configuration through IPAM, NetBox, and fabric-manager APIs such as Netris and UFM. Keep intended configuration, applied state, and inventory consistent throughout the tenant and node lifecycle.
• Tenant isolation and network security: Own segmentation and traffic policy across the Groq management plane, tenant clusters, and physical fabrics. Define permitted communication between environments and verify isolation through provisioning, scaling, maintenance, and hardware reassignment. Work with security engineering on network access controls and hardening requirements.
• Network standards and configuration lifecycle: Establish addressing, routing, and configuration standards for GroqMetal’s management plane and tenant networks. Implement declarative configuration and continuous reconciliation through Kubernetes-native controllers, fabric-manager APIs, and GitOps, with code review, automated testing and validation, staged rollout, and recovery procedures. Detect and reconcile configuration drift, and maintain tenant isolation as nodes enter, leave, or return to tenant networks during provisioning, repair, and reassignment.
• Production network reliability: Own network telemetry, troubleshooting, and incident remediation. Diagnose packet loss, routing failures, congestion, and unexpected traffic across hosts, clusters, fabrics, and the edge. Turn recurring incidents and performance findings into prioritized improvements to the managed service.

Ideal candidates have/are

• Deep networking knowledge and production ownership: You have designed and operated networking services on data center infrastructure through deployment, expansion, maintenance, and incidents. You understand TCP/IP, BGP, routing policy, peering, ECMP, segmentation, and interconnects well enough to explain packet paths, diagnose failures, and evaluate the consequences of a configuration change.
• Bare-metal data center networking expertise: Experience operating leaf-spine fabrics, underlay and overlay networks, and tenant separation using technologies such as VLANs, VRFs, and EVPN/VXLAN.
• Strong Kubernetes and Linux networking experience: Practical knowledge of CNI behavior, Cilium or comparable systems, network policy, service exposure, and the interaction between cluster networking and physical infrastructure.
• Kubernetes-native development, network automation, and GitOps experience: You have built Kubernetes controllers, operators, and custom resources in Go. You can integrate network APIs through reconciliation loops that handle retries, partial failures, and resource cleanup safely. You have managed changes through version control, code review, automated testing, and controlled rollout.
• Experience building multitenant infrastructure or managed Kubernetes products: You have helped deliver Kubernetes networking as a service, including customer onboarding, provisioning, upgrades, scaling, and production support. You can turn customer requirements into supported features with defined behavior, limits, and operational procedures.
• Experience securing networks that run customer workloads: You have designed and operated tenant separation, management network boundaries, and traffic controls, with practical methods for testing that those controls work.
• Fabric management and IPAM experience: Netris, UFM, NetBox, or comparable fabric management and IPAM systems.
• GPU infrastructure expertise: NVIDIA GPU infrastructure and AI networking, including InfiniBand, Spectrum-X, NVL72 systems, RDMA, RoCE, and congestion control.
• GPU cluster networking experience: Networking for large GPU clusters, including distributed workload performance, high-bandwidth east-west traffic, and multi-site connectivity.
• Product judgment grounded in networking: You can understand a customer’s requirements, evaluate the network implications, and define a capability the platform can reliably deliver and support.

Compensation

Groq is committed to providing competitive compensation through our Total Cash philosophy, which incorporates potential bonus value directly into base pay. The total cash salary range for this position, which is inclusive of the potential bonus value, is $270,400 - $401,600, with individual placement determined by your geographic location, experience, skills, and alignment with internal compensation standards. This range is specific to candidates located in the United States. Compensation for international candidates will vary based on local market dynamics. Beyond cash compensation, Groq also offers a Long-Term Incentive (LTI) Program and a robust suite of employee benefits.

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