Staff Networking Platform Engineer, Infrastructure

Groq•New York, NY

23h•$270,400 - $401,600

About The Position

Groq is seeking a network engineer with deep data center and Kubernetes networking experience to own networking across GroqMetal’s management plane and tenant clusters. The role encompasses network architecture, configuration, security, and production operations, from host and cluster networking through data center fabrics to edge peering and interconnects. The engineer will manage changes through fabric managers, automation, and GitOps, applying a detailed understanding of protocols, packet paths, and failure behavior. The position translates customer connectivity, isolation, and performance requirements into managed platform capabilities. Success means customers can provision and use networking reliably, tenant boundaries are demonstrably enforced, and network changes and failures can be diagnosed and resolved without reconstructing the system by hand. The role is based in one of Groq’s three hiring hubs: the Dallas, San Francisco, or New York City area. Remote work is available while Groq establishes a local office, with the expectation that the role will transition to onsite once the office opens. The total cash salary range is $270,400–$401,600 for candidates located in the United States, inclusive of potential bonus value. Individual placement depends on geographic location, experience, skills, and alignment with internal compensation standards. International compensation varies by local market. Groq also offers a Long-Term Incentive (LTI) Program and employee benefits.

Requirements

Deep networking knowledge and production ownership, including designing and operating networking services on data center infrastructure through deployment, expansion, maintenance, and incidents.
Strong understanding of TCP/IP, BGP, routing policy, peering, ECMP, segmentation, and interconnects, including the ability to explain packet paths, diagnose failures, and evaluate configuration-change consequences.
Experience operating bare-metal data center leaf-spine fabrics, underlay and overlay networks, and tenant separation technologies such as VLANs, VRFs, and EVPN/VXLAN.
Practical knowledge of Kubernetes and Linux networking, including CNI behavior, Cilium or comparable systems, network policy, service exposure, and integration between cluster networking and physical infrastructure.
Experience building Kubernetes controllers, operators, and custom resources in Go, and integrating network APIs through reconciliation loops that safely handle retries, partial failures, and resource cleanup.
Experience managing changes through version control, code review, automated testing, and controlled rollout.
Experience building multitenant infrastructure or managed Kubernetes products, including customer onboarding, provisioning, upgrades, scaling, and production support.
Ability to translate customer requirements into supported features with defined behavior, limits, and operational procedures.
Experience securing networks that run customer workloads, including tenant separation, management network boundaries, and traffic controls, with practical methods for testing those controls.
Experience with fabric management and IPAM systems such as Netris, UFM, NetBox, or comparable systems.
Ability to understand customer requirements, evaluate network implications, and define capabilities the platform can reliably deliver and support.

Nice To Haves

Expertise in NVIDIA GPU infrastructure and AI networking, including InfiniBand, Spectrum-X, NVL72 systems, RDMA, RoCE, and congestion control.
Experience networking large GPU clusters, including distributed workload performance, high-bandwidth east-west traffic, and multi-site connectivity.

Responsibilities

Translate customer connectivity, isolation, access, and performance requirements into supported platform features, and define how those features are requested, provisioned, changed, observed, and removed.
Build Kubernetes-native automation to create, modify, and remove tenant networks and manage node membership through provisioning, scaling, repair, replacement, and reassignment.
Verify isolation and connectivity during tenant and node lifecycle transitions, recover safely from partial failures, and remove stale configuration before resources are reassigned.
Own dynamic configuration of tenant networks, BGP, routing policy, VLANs, and overlays across management, tenant, and external networks.
Build Kubernetes-native automation through fabric-manager APIs to provision and manage customer service exposure, ingress and egress, VIPs, load balancers, and public IPs; validate convergence, failover, reachability, and isolation.
Own networking for the Groq management plane and tenant clusters, including Cilium, network policy, service routing, ingress, egress, and integration with bare-metal networks.
Automate tenant configuration and lifecycle operations for GPU networking, including NVL72 systems, InfiniBand, RoCE, and GPUDirect, through supported platform and fabric-management interfaces.
Validate GPU network connectivity, isolation, and performance as tenant allocations and node membership change.
Own dynamic address allocation, network inventory integration, and tenant network configuration through IPAM, NetBox, and fabric-manager APIs such as Netris and UFM.
Keep intended configuration, applied state, and inventory consistent throughout tenant and node lifecycles.
Own segmentation and traffic policy across the Groq management plane, tenant clusters, and physical fabrics; define permitted communication and verify isolation through provisioning, scaling, maintenance, and hardware reassignment.
Work with security engineering on network access controls and hardening requirements.
Establish addressing, routing, and configuration standards for GroqMetal’s management plane and tenant networks.
Implement declarative configuration and continuous reconciliation through Kubernetes-native controllers, fabric-manager APIs, and GitOps, with code review, automated testing and validation, staged rollout, and recovery procedures.
Detect and reconcile configuration drift, and maintain tenant isolation as nodes enter, leave, or return to tenant networks during provisioning, repair, and reassignment.
Own network telemetry, troubleshooting, and incident remediation; diagnose packet loss, routing failures, congestion, and unexpected traffic across hosts, clusters, fabrics, and the edge.
Turn recurring incidents and performance findings into prioritized improvements to the managed service.