Distinguished Engineer, AI Infrastructure

Equinix • Redwood City, CA

5d

About The Position

Equinix is building a new generation of AI infrastructure products. As a Distinguished Engineer on the AI Infrastructure Products team, you will design, build, and launch platforms and services that enable customers to run AI inference close to their data, clouds, and partners across Equinix’s global footprint. This is a hands-on builder role, taking products from initial concept through launch and hardening them into reliable, globally scaled platforms. The work spans container- and service-based compute platforms, customer-facing APIs, and networking that connects AI workloads with Equinix Fabric and other interconnection products.

As the senior-most technical authority for AI Infrastructure Products, you will set the multi-year architecture vision and influence how Equinix competes in AI infrastructure. You will operate at company and industry levels, and be recognized as an expert inside and outside Equinix. The role combines technical strategy, product incubation, architecture, implementation, operational reliability, networking, and engineering leadership.

Requirements

• Strong experience building and operating distributed systems and services at scale.
• Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem, such as containers, operators, Helm, or service mesh.
• Proficiency in Go.
• Deep experience designing APIs and service-oriented or microservices architectures.
• Solid background in platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and reliability engineering.
• Experience with AI/ML inference, such as model serving frameworks, GPU scheduling, or performance tuning, or a strong demonstrated interest in developing deep expertise in this area.
• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, routing, BGP, load balancing, and overlays, and their application to multisite, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
• Track record of taking new products or platforms from zero to one and through launch.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and driving decisions with incomplete information.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including explaining complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Python or other systems languages.
• Experience with GPU infrastructure and accelerated computing, such as NVIDIA GPU Operator, CUDA, or RDMA/RoCE/InfiniBand.
• Experience building on or integrating with interconnection or network-as-a-service platforms.
• Background at a cloud provider, data center, or infrastructure-as-a-service company.
• Open-source contributions, such as to CNCF projects, conference talks, or published technical writing.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the multi-year technical vision and reference architecture for AI infrastructure across Equinix, aligning product, platform, and network strategy.
• Influence executive leadership and company-wide technology investments, and represent Equinix with strategic customers, partners, standards bodies, and industry forums.
• Mentor and develop Senior Principal and Principal Engineers, and shape the organization’s technical talent bar.
• Design, build, and operate infrastructure and inference-related products and services, including customer-facing APIs.
• Write production-quality code, primarily in Go, and set high standards for code quality, testing, and design reviews.
• Design secure, well-documented, API-first, service-oriented architectures that are easy for customers and partners to integrate with.
• Track developments in the inference ecosystem, including serving frameworks, accelerators, and model optimization, and bring appropriate technologies into Equinix products.
• Take ideas from concept through prototype to production launch, partnering with Product Management to shape requirements and define MVPs.
• Run proofs of concept, make build-versus-buy decisions, and turn early learnings into durable architecture in ambiguous problem spaces.
• Translate customer needs and market changes into technical strategy and product roadmap recommendations.
• Architect and operate platforms and services that scale across Equinix’s global data center footprint.
• Apply platform engineering, DevOps, and SRE practices—including automation, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, SLOs, and incident response—to maintain reliability at scale.
• Identify and resolve systemic platform reliability, performance, and cost issues.
• Integrate AI infrastructure products with Equinix Fabric, Network Edge, and other interconnection products so customers can securely connect workloads to clouds, partners, and their environments.
• Partner with network architecture and product teams to design low-latency, resilient connectivity for distributed inference.
• Lead architecture and design reviews, and author design documents and decision records.
• Mentor and grow engineers, raise the technical bar, and help build a strong engineering culture on a new team.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Security, Operations, and go-to-market teams, and engage directly with strategic customers and partners.

Benefits

• Employee Assistance Program.
• Health or healthcare insurance coverage.
• Life insurance.
• Disability insurance.
• Voluntary or optional benefit plans.
• Retirement or savings plans, including employer contributions where applicable.
• Accrued paid time off, vacation or personal time, and paid holidays.
• Employees are eligible for a bonus; equity may be offered depending on the position.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal