Senior Principal Front-End Network Engineer, AI Infrastructure Operations

About the role

The Network Operations and Engineering teams at Nscale operate some of the most demanding networking environments in the industry, supporting large-scale AI GPU clusters where network performance directly impacts customer outcomes. We’re looking for a Senior Principal Front End Network Engineer – AI Infrastructure to provide technical leadership across Nscale’s front-end networking domain.

Responsibilities

• Owning the technical direction and operational strategy for Nscale’s front-end AI infrastructure networks at the highest level
• Designing, reviewing, and evolving large-scale Ethernet leaf-spine / Clos fabric architectures (including Arista and Nokia platforms) to support future growth, inference workloads, and storage requirements
• Acting as the senior-most escalation point for the most complex front-end network incidents, guiding deep technical investigations and systemic fixes
• Driving cross-team and cross-functional initiatives to improve fabric reliability, performance predictability, observability, and operational maturity at scale
• Defining standards for hardware configuration, routing, congestion management, firmware lifecycle management, automation, and change safety across Arista EOS and Nokia platforms
• Prioritizing and driving measurable improvements in uptime, latency consistency, capacity efficiency, and incident reduction for front-end services

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in network engineering, with deep focus on hyperscale data center, cloud, or AI infrastructure networking
• Expert-level operational and architectural experience with large-scale Ethernet data center fabrics (leaf-spine / Clos topologies)
• Strong hands-on expertise with Arista (EOS / Etherlink) and/or Nokia (7220 IXR, 7250 IXR, 7750 SR series) platforms in production environments at scale
• Deep understanding of modern data center routing and control planes (BGP, OSPF, ECMP, EVPN-VXLAN)
• Proven experience with long-haul circuits, DCI, and optical transport (dark fiber, carrier Ethernet, coherent optics, ZR/ZR+)
• Strong background in storage networking over Ethernet and shared storage connectivity at hyperscale
• Demonstrated ability to debug and resolve complex cross-layer issues spanning hardware, optics, routing, and application layers
• Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives across teams and influence strategy without direct authority
• A systems-level mindset, balancing performance, reliability, scalability, and operational cost at the highest level

Skills

• Extensive experience with Arista or Nokia platforms at hyperscale or large AI infrastructure scale
• Deep familiarity with front-end network design patterns for massive AI clusters (inference, management, and storage tiers)
• Experience designing or operating large-scale DCI / long-haul optical or carrier networks
• Strong automation and tooling experience (Python, Ansible, validation frameworks, telemetry pipelines)
• Prior experience influencing platform or infrastructure strategy at significant scale