Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Networking (Groq Metal)
About The Position
Groq is hiring a Staff or Sr Staff Infrastructure Engineer to own the bare-metal layer of its platform, turning thousands of physical servers across multiple data centers into healthy, secure, tenant-assignable Kubernetes nodes and keeping them operational. The role is part of the Platform Engineering team and serves as technical lead for systems below the Kubernetes API, including server provisioning, operating system lifecycle, data center networking, BMC and firmware management, and integration with modern DPUs. The position owns automated bare-metal bring-up, OS image lifecycle, firmware and hardware management, fleet health telemetry and remediation, and data center networking fabrics. It also supports the Kubernetes substrate that runs Groq’s multi-tenant control plane, including cluster infrastructure and GitOps workflows. The engineer will make new data center capacity available through repeatable, automated workflows, partner with data center field staff on maintenance and incident response, and represent the physical layer in platform design discussions. The role is based in the Dallas, San Francisco, or New York City area. Remote work is available while Groq establishes its local office, with an expectation that the role will transition to onsite once the office opens. The total cash salary range is $270,400–$365,000 for Staff or $341,400–$401,600 for Sr Staff, depending on location, experience, skills, and internal compensation standards. Groq currently offers a quarterly bonus as an interim alternative to equity and plans to introduce long-term incentive participation in the near future. Employees also receive a robust suite of benefits.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of experience in production infrastructure.
- At least 3 years owning bare-metal lifecycle at scale.
- Strong data center networking fundamentals, including BGP, leaf/spine, MTU, congestion control, and fabric debugging.
- Production Kubernetes operations experience, including cluster bring-up, CNI internals, and fleet upgrades.
- Comfort with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and Helm, and with GitOps.
- Experience being on-call for a fleet of physical machines.
- Must be based in the Dallas, San Francisco, or New York City area.
- Must meet applicable export-control eligibility criteria, such as qualifying as a U.S. Person or being eligible for an applicable export license, for roles subject to U.S. export control requirements.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with NVIDIA GPU clusters at scale, including H100, GH200, GB200, or NVL72 systems, driver stack, NCCL, NVLink, or GPU Operator.
- Experience with DPUs such as NVIDIA BlueField or AMD Pensando, and offload patterns.
- Experience with Spectrum-X, RoCE, or InfiniBand fabrics for AI workloads.
- Background in hyperscaler infrastructure, AI cloud, high-frequency trading, or high-performance computing.
Responsibilities
- Own bare-metal server lifecycle at scale, including automated server bring-up, OS image lifecycle, BIOS/firmware/BMC fleet management, hardware health telemetry, and remediation.
- Own data center networking fabric capabilities, including leaf/spine networking, BGP, ECMP, RoCE, congestion control, tenant traffic isolation, IPAM, and switch automation.
- Partner with networking architects on Spectrum-X-class fabrics for multi-tenant AI workloads.
- Build and maintain the Kubernetes substrate for the multi-tenant control plane, including host clusters, Cilium CNI, Karpenter, GitOps via Flux or Argo, and virtual cluster integration.
- Automate the process of bringing new data centers online, from rack delivery to production capacity available to customers.
- Partner with data center field staff on hardware faults, maintenance windows, and on-call response.
- Represent the physical layer in platform design conversations.
Benefits
- Quarterly bonus as an interim alternative to equity.
- Plans to introduce long-term incentive program participation in the near future.
- Robust suite of benefits.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
