Network Engineering Lead

Gimlet Labs•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Gimlet Labs is seeking a Network Engineering Lead to own the strategy, architecture, design, deployment standards, and operations of the network infrastructure that powers Gimlet's AI datacenters. This person will be responsible for both the front-end network that connects customers, services, sites, and external networks, and the back-end network that enables high-performance AI infrastructure, GPU clusters, storage, control planes, management networks, and data center interconnect. You will define Gimlet's network architecture from first principles, build the roadmap for scaling across multiple sites, establish engineering and operational standards, and lead the team responsible for delivering and operating production-grade network infrastructure. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who can operate at multiple altitudes: network strategy, architecture, vendor selection, physical deployment standards, routing design, observability, automation, incident response, and team-building.

Requirements

Deep experience designing and operating large-scale data center networks, cloud networks, AI infrastructure networks, HPC networks, or hyperscale network environments.
Understanding of both external/front-end networking and internal/back-end data center fabrics.
Hands-on experience with routing, switching, BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, spine-leaf fabrics, WAN/DCI, out-of-band management, optics, structured cabling, and network telemetry.
Ability to design networks for high availability, high throughput, low latency, operational simplicity, and rapid deployment.
Experience operating production networks where uptime, performance, and change discipline matter.
Comfortable making build-vs-buy decisions, evaluating network vendors, and setting technical standards.
Ability to partner with deployment, facilities, supply chain, and site teams to turn network designs into working infrastructure.
Excited to build a team and operating model, not just design architecture on paper.
Clear communication with executives, engineers, vendors, deployment teams, and data center operators.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI infrastructure, GPU clusters, InfiniBand, RoCE, RDMA, high-density compute, HPC, or distributed training environments.
Experience designing or operating networks for cloud providers, hyperscalers, neoclouds, colocation environments, or large-scale infrastructure platforms.
Familiarity with NVIDIA networking, high-performance Ethernet fabrics, storage networking, cluster interconnects, and data center interconnect architectures.
Experience building network automation using Python, Go, Ansible, Terraform, NetBox, GitOps workflows, or similar tooling.
Experience building monitoring and telemetry systems for network health, latency, congestion, packet loss, interface errors, and capacity forecasting.
Experience leading network incident response, root cause analysis, and operational improvement programs.
A track record of hiring, mentoring, and leading senior network engineers.

Responsibilities

Define Gimlet's end-to-end network architecture across data centers, AI clusters, customer-facing services, management networks, and inter-site connectivity.
Own the network roadmap for current and future sites, including capacity planning, topology, scaling strategy, redundancy, performance, and operational readiness.
Lead design for both front-end connectivity and back-end AI infrastructure fabrics.
Establish standards for routing, switching, IP addressing, cabling, optics, out-of-band management, observability, change management, and network acceptance.
Partner with Data Center Operations, Deployment TPMs, Network Capacity Delivery, Site Operations, Facilities, Supply Chain, and Engineering to bring new capacity online.
Build repeatable network deployment and validation processes for new sites and expansions.
Own network operations, including monitoring, incident response, troubleshooting, postmortems, vendor escalation, and reliability improvements.
Create the hiring and team plan for Network Engineering, including network deployment engineers, capacity delivery, and future operations roles.
Develop automation and tooling strategy for configuration management, validation, telemetry, and fleet-scale network operations.
Serve as Gimlet's technical authority on network architecture, network vendor decisions, and production network readiness.