Senior Front-End Network Engineer, AI Infrastructure Operations

About the role

Within Nscale, the Network Operations team is responsible for the performance and reliability of the high-speed networks that underpin our AI platforms. These front-end networks are critical to inference workloads, cluster management, data movement, and storage connectivity.

Responsibilities

• Owning 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
• Leading the diagnosis and resolution of complex network incidents (P0/P1), spanning optics, routing, switching hardware, long-haul circuits, and storage connectivity layers
• Driving blameless postmortems and implementing preventative fixes to improve long-term fabric stability and availability
• Partnering with SREs to define requirements for automation and tooling, and contributing to network provisioning, validation, and monitoring systems
• Collaborating with Network Architecture and Engineering teams to validate designs and enforce standards for routing, congestion management, firmware baselines, and change safety
• Monitoring fabric utilisation and performance, identifying bottlenecks, and tuning for predictable latency and throughput on front-end networks
• Acting as a subject matter expert for cross-functional teams on high-speed Ethernet networking, long-haul/DCI circuits, and storage network integration
• Participating 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
• 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

What We Can Offer You

• A highly competitive package (base + equity) with reviews every 12 months
• Join the fastest-growing tech startup, your chance to push boundaries, collaborate with brilliant minds, and make your mark on cutting-edge AI
• An expectation of a dynamic progression plan tailored to your ambitions

Equal Opportunities Statement

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.