Staff Networking Platform Engineer, Infrastructure

Groq•Worth, IL

1d•$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 owns network architecture, configuration, security, and production operations, spanning host and cluster networking, data center fabrics, edge peering, and interconnects. Network changes are managed through fabric managers, automation, and GitOps, supported by a detailed understanding of protocols, packet paths, and failure behavior. The engineer will turn customer connectivity, isolation, and performance requirements into managed platform capabilities. The goal is to make networking reliable to provision and use, ensure tenant boundaries are demonstrably enforced, and make network changes and failures diagnosable and resolvable without having to reconstruct the system manually.

Requirements

Deep networking knowledge and production ownership, including experience designing and operating data center networking services through deployment, expansion, maintenance, and incidents.
Strong understanding of TCP/IP, BGP, routing policy, peering, ECMP, segmentation, and interconnects, with the ability to explain packet paths, diagnose failures, and assess configuration-change consequences.
Bare-metal data center networking experience operating 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 between cluster networking and physical infrastructure.
Experience building Kubernetes controllers, operators, and custom resources in Go.
Ability to integrate network APIs through reconciliation loops that handle retries, partial failures, and resource cleanup safely.
Experience managing changes through version control, code review, automated testing, and controlled rollout.
Experience building multitenant infrastructure or managed Kubernetes products, including Kubernetes networking as a service, 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 designing and operating 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.
GPU cluster networking experience, including networking for large GPU clusters, 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 throughout their lifecycle.
Build Kubernetes-native automation to create, modify, and remove tenant networks and manage node membership through provisioning, scaling, repair, replacement, and reassignment.
Verify tenant isolation and connectivity during network 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 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 during provisioning, scaling, maintenance, and hardware reassignment.
Work with security engineering on network access controls and hardening requirements.
Establish addressing, routing, and configuration standards for the management plane and tenant networks.
Implement declarative configuration and continuous reconciliation through Kubernetes-native controllers, fabric-manager APIs, and GitOps, using 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.