Staff Networking Platform Engineer, Infrastructure

Groq•New York, NY

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 spans 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 detailed knowledge of protocols, packet paths, and failure behavior to turn customer connectivity, isolation, and performance requirements into managed platform capabilities. The position is based in the Dallas, San Francisco, or New York City area. Remote work is available while Groq establishes a local office, with an expectation that the role will transition to onsite once the office opens. 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 also owns network telemetry, troubleshooting, incident remediation, and improvements to the managed service based on recurring incidents and performance findings.

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 sufficient to explain packet paths, diagnose failures, and assess configuration-change consequences.
Experience operating bare-metal data center networks, including leaf-spine fabrics, underlay and overlay networks, and tenant separation using technologies such as VLANs, VRFs, and EVPN/VXLAN.
Strong Kubernetes and Linux networking experience, including practical knowledge of CNI behavior, Cilium or comparable systems, network policy, service exposure, and integration with physical infrastructure.
Experience building Kubernetes controllers, operators, and custom resources in Go.
Ability to integrate 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 delivering 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 designing and operating tenant separation, management network boundaries, and traffic controls for networks carrying customer workloads, with practical methods for testing that controls work.
Experience with fabric management and IPAM systems such as Netris, UFM, NetBox, or comparable systems.
Product judgment grounded in networking: ability to understand customer requirements, evaluate network implications, and define capabilities the platform can reliably deliver and support.
Must qualify as a U.S. Person for export-control purposes or otherwise be eligible for an applicable export license for roles requiring access to controlled technology or information.

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, defining how 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.
Use Kubernetes-native automation and fabric-manager APIs to provision and manage customer service exposure, ingress and egress, VIPs, load balancers, and public IPs.
Validate routing 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 management plane, tenant clusters, and physical fabrics; define permitted communication between environments 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.