IP Network Design Engineer, Long-Term Design & Delivery

Meta•Menlo Park, CA

1d•$184,000 - $257,000

About The Position

Meta's backbone carries the traffic behind every product and, increasingly, the AI training and inference fabrics reshaping the network. The Long-Term Design & Delivery (LTD) team owns how that backbone evolves 2-3 years out: turning long-range traffic demand into the topology, designs, and technology introductions partnering with delivery orgs to execute. We're looking for a Production Network Engineer to lead IP design across our backbone domains. Production Network Engineers at Meta are hybrid software and network engineers. While coding is a requirement for this role, the emphasis is design and de-risking at scale: defining multi-year topology plans, driving new-product introductions and migrations, and producing designs the delivery and deployment teams can build without churn.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience
6 years of experience in designing and/or operating large-scale IP networks
Deep TCP/IP, IPv4/IPv6, and BGP (plus MPLS / IS-IS or similar) — configuration, typical patterns, performance tuning
Understanding of 400/800G Ethernet and optical transport (DWDM) as it applies to backbone links and long-haul design
Experience with network device configuration for at least one vendor (Juniper, Cisco, Arista, etc.)
Coding in a higher-level language (Python / C++ / Go)
Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners, resolving technical disagreements, and driving alignment across teams without direct authority

Nice To Haves

Backbone/WAN experience in the context of hyperscalers
Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices (e.g., risk assessment, bias mitigation, quality and accuracy reviews)
Experience introducing new network platforms and driving cross-generation migrations at scale
10+ years of experience designing/operating backbone or large-scale IP networks
Experience setting technical direction for a team of 3+ engineers
Demonstrated ongoing AI skill development (e.g., prompt/context engineering, agent orchestration) and staying current with emerging AI technologies
Understanding of AI workloads and the demands they place on topology
Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact (e.g., efficiency gains, quality improvements)
Familiarity with capacity-planning processes and physical constraints (cabling, space, power, fiber)

Responsibilities

Own long-term IP backbone design for one or more domains or regions — translating business demand into topology, product definition and device selection 2-3 years ahead
Drive new-product introductions: define how and when to introduce them and the migration strategy across existing generations
Design and drive large-scale migrations in live environments: MOPs, sequencing, risk assessment, de-risking without outages
Own and evolve design rules, standards, and BOMs; drive consensus on simplifications that make designs repeatable and cut delivery churn
Deliver a clean product definition and design handoff to delivery/deployment partners
Write and review code/automation for the entire design lifecycle: what-if analysis, BOM generation, hardware selection and partner with teams across the entire tooling-ecosystem
Partner cross-functionally across Capacity Planning, Network Site sourcing, Network Fiber sourcing and represent designs in XFN reviews and drive decisions through influence
Set technical direction for a domain and be the escalation point for complex design/topology problems
Collaborate across regions (incl. EMEA/APAC), with flexibility for global-friendly hours, ~10-15% travel expected