Staff Hardware Design Engineer

Fastly•San Francisco, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Staff Hardware Design Engineer, you will be a key member of the Hardware Engineering team, responsible for designing and implementing the hardware infrastructure that powers Fastly's stack. This role involves collaborating with internal teams and external vendors on the design, testing, and rollout of hardware to ensure a highly performant, available, and scalable infrastructure. You will focus on hardware systems, networking, and systems engineering for distributed systems that are scalable, fault-tolerant, and cost-effective. The team is responsible for the design of Fastly’s underlying hardware infrastructure and ensuring its stability and performance. You will collaborate with various software development teams, supply chain, operations, and external vendors/partners, using your insights and data to drive the architecture and implementation of Fastly’s Points of Presence (POPs).

Requirements

8+ years of experience with hardware system architecture and associated tradeoffs that include software, hardware, operational cost, and mechanical aspects.
Experience collaborating with a broad range of roles, senior leadership, stakeholders and vendors/partners.
Obsessed with detailed and timely documentation on all aspects involved with the hardware and tooling.
Strong foundation of management platforms and tools: console servers, IPMI, SSH, PXE, and telemetry systems.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills for both internal and external facing situations.

Nice To Haves

Extensive knowledge and experience of storage and memory subsystems.
Experience with firmware development, programming, bash scripting, tooling creation and maintenance.
Experience with CDN hardware and software architecture.
Knowledge in open source operating systems, hypervisors, and orchestration frameworks.
Background in test automation.
Deep understanding of various CPU architectures.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with software engineering teams, supply chain, vendors, and other leaders or groups to evolve the Fastly hardware infrastructure based on new requirements, constraints, and/or changing technology.
Develop specifications, RFPs, and other related requirements documentation showcasing the Fastly requirements and design principles for the overall life cycle of the platform and infrastructure.
Play an active role in the hardware selection process by guiding vendors to understand our requirements, test early engineering samples of next-gen hardware (on and offsite).
Identify and drive development for off the shelf, semi-custom, and custom SKUs where required from partners or vendors to maximize CAPEX efficiency/TCO while balancing system performance.
Contribute to the hardware engineering team in the implementation of hardware, testing, firmware, and BIOS changes, including working with operations on keeping the fleet current.
Collaborate on the testing of hardware - components and system in the lab, pre-production environment, and in production to make data driven decisions on the hardware architecture and vendors.
Work cross functionally to troubleshoot and triage hardware throughout the full life cycle of the hardware platforms.
Engage application development teams to ensure compatibility and assist in performance evaluation to meet platform requirements and expectations.
Mentor junior engineering developers, operations, and infrastructure staff.
Assist in vendor quality activities not limited to: First Article Inspections (FAI), site audit, and root cause analysis.