Senior Front-End Network Engineer, AI Infrastructure Operations

Nscale · New York, NY · 1 wk ago

HybridInformation TechnologyFull-time

Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI, providing cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. We enable AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development, bolstering technical capabilities, and supporting strategic business outcomes such as cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility. Our culture thrives on relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member drives excellence and urgency.

About the Role

The Network Operations team at Nscale is responsible for the performance and reliability of the high-speed networks underpinning our AI platforms. These front-end networks are critical to inference workloads, cluster management, data movement, and storage connectivity. As a Senior Front End Network Engineer – AI Infrastructure, you will ensure the day-to-day health, stability, and performance of Nscale’s large-scale Ethernet front-end networks. You’ll bring deep operational expertise from hyperscale or high-performance environments to lead incident response, performance tuning, automation, and continuous improvement of production AI networking systems.

Responsibilities

Own the operational health, configuration consistency, and performance tuning of large-scale Ethernet front-end fabrics (leaf-spine / Clos) supporting AI inference, management, and storage workloads
Lead the diagnosis and resolution of complex network incidents (P0/P1), spanning optics, routing, switching hardware, long-haul circuits, and storage connectivity layers
Drive blameless postmortems and implement preventative fixes to improve long-term fabric stability and availability
Partner with SREs to define requirements for automation and tooling, and contribute to network provisioning, validation, and monitoring systems
Collaborate with Network Architecture and Engineering teams to validate designs and enforce standards for routing, congestion management, firmware baselines, and change safety
Monitor fabric utilisation and performance, identify bottlenecks, and tune for predictable latency and throughput on front-end networks
Act as a subject matter expert for cross-functional teams on high-speed Ethernet networking, long-haul/DCI circuits, and storage network integration
Participate in an on-call rotation supporting mission-critical, customer-facing infrastructure

Requirements

5+ years of experience in network engineering, with at least 3 years operating large-scale Ethernet data centre or cloud networks
Deep, hands-on operational experience with high-speed Ethernet fabrics in hyperscale or production environments
Strong expertise with Arista (EOS) and/or Nokia (7220 IXR / 7250 IXR / 7750 SR series) platforms
Solid understanding of modern data centre networking, including BGP, OSPF, ECMP, EVPN-VXLAN, and leaf-spine architectures
Proven experience with long-haul circuits and DCI (dark fiber, carrier Ethernet, coherent optics)
Experience with storage networking over Ethernet and shared storage connectivity
Proven ability to troubleshoot complex network issues using Linux-based tooling and fabric diagnostics
Proficiency in Python, Go, or shell scripting for automation, data analysis, or configuration management
Experience working in a 24/7 operational environment with a strong focus on reliability and toil reduction

Nice to Have

Extensive hands-on experience with Arista or Nokia platforms at scale
Deep familiarity with front-end network patterns for large AI clusters (inference traffic, management networks, and storage integration)
Experience operating large-scale DCI / long-haul optical or carrier networks
Strong background in network observability and telemetry systems (streaming telemetry, sFlow, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
Prior experience in automation-first network operations or building internal tooling

Benefits