Senior Front-End Network Engineer, AI Infrastructure Operations

Nscale • Seattle, WA

23d

About The Position

Nscale is seeking a Senior Front-End Network Engineer to join its Network Operations team, which maintains the performance and reliability of high-speed networks underpinning AI platforms. The role focuses on the day-to-day health, stability, configuration consistency, and performance of large-scale Ethernet front-end networks supporting inference, cluster management, data movement, and storage connectivity.

The engineer will bring operational expertise from hyperscale or high-performance environments and contribute to incident response, performance tuning, automation, and continuous improvement of production AI networking systems. The role includes participation in an on-call rotation for mission-critical, customer-facing infrastructure and collaboration with SRE, Network Architecture, and Engineering teams.

Nscale describes its environment as collaborative, supportive, and innovative, with a dynamic progression plan and a highly competitive package including base pay and equity, reviewed every 12 months. The company encourages applications from people of diverse backgrounds and offers accommodations upon request.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of network engineering experience, including at least 3 years operating large-scale Ethernet data center or cloud networks.
• Deep, hands-on operational experience with high-speed Ethernet fabrics in hyperscale or production environments.
• Strong expertise with Arista (EOS) and/or Nokia (7220 IXR, 7250 IXR, or 7750 SR series) platforms.
• Solid understanding of modern data center networking, including BGP, OSPF, ECMP, EVPN-VXLAN, and leaf-spine architectures.
• Experience with long-haul circuits and DCI, including dark fiber, carrier Ethernet, and 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 in a 24/7 operational environment with a strong focus on reliability and toil reduction.

Nice To Haves

• Extensive hands-on experience with Arista or Nokia platforms at scale.
• Deep familiarity with front-end network patterns for large AI clusters, including 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, such as streaming telemetry, sFlow, Prometheus, or Grafana.
• Prior experience in automation-first network operations or building internal tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own operational health, configuration consistency, and performance tuning of large-scale Ethernet front-end fabrics, including leaf-spine/Clos networks supporting AI inference, management, and storage workloads.
• Lead diagnosis and resolution of complex P0/P1 network incidents involving optics, routing, switching hardware, long-haul circuits, and storage connectivity.
• Drive blameless postmortems and implement preventative fixes to improve fabric stability and availability.
• Partner with SREs to define automation and tooling requirements and contribute to network provisioning, validation, and monitoring systems.
• Collaborate with Network Architecture and Engineering teams to validate designs and enforce standards for routing, congestion management, firmware baselines, and change safety.
• Monitor fabric utilization and performance, identify bottlenecks, and tune front-end networks for predictable latency and throughput.
• Serve as a subject matter expert for cross-functional teams on high-speed Ethernet networking, long-haul/DCI circuits, and storage network integration.
• Participate in an on-call rotation supporting mission-critical, customer-facing infrastructure.

Benefits

• Highly competitive package including base pay and equity, with reviews every 12 months.
• Dynamic progression plan tailored to employee ambitions, with support for growth and taking on new challenges.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed