Data Center Controls Network Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Data Center Controls Network Engineer (OT Networking): Designing and scaling controls and OT network architectures for high-density AI data centers with an accent on resilience, security, and scalability. Focus on translating compute and power requirements into practical network designs and ensuring failure-domain isolation.

Location: San Francisco. Role requires periodic travel to data center campuses, vendors, labs, and construction sites.

Salary: $257k – $327k + Equity

Company

hirify.global is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.

What you will do

• Define controls, automation, and OT network requirements and reference architectures for AI data center campuses.
• Design physical and logical network topologies, including IP/VLAN schemes, routing, switching, and firewall policies.
• Develop day-two network operations requirements, including configuration backups, firmware lifecycles, and rollback plans.
• Partner with electrical, mechanical, and security teams to align OT network systems with GPU deployments and campus telemetry.
• Define integration patterns and protocol requirements for BACnet, Modbus, OPC UA, MQTT, and other industrial interfaces.
• Lead technical evaluation of suppliers and support site acceptance testing (SAT) and integrated systems testing.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in controls engineering, industrial automation, or OT networking in critical infrastructure environments.
• Strong expertise in Layer 2/3 OT network design, including routing, VRFs, ACLs, and network segmentation.
• Hands-on experience with industrial networking hardware (Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Rockwell Stratix, Siemens Ruggedcom).
• Proficiency with industrial protocols: BACnet/IP, Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC UA, MQTT, IEC-61850, and SNMP.
• Experience with virtualized OT environments such as VMware vSAN or Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.
• Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Computer, Network, or Systems Engineering.

Nice to have

• Master's degree in a relevant engineering discipline.
• Professional certifications: CCNA/CCNP, PCNSA/PCNSE, JNCIA/JNCIS.
• Cybersecurity certifications: CISSP, GICSP, or ISA/IEC 62443.
• Experience with network automation using Ansible, Terraform, or Python.
• Experience using AI agents or MCP-connected tools for telemetry analysis.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to build the foundational infrastructure for the next generation of AI.
• Competitive compensation package including equity.
• Dynamic work environment spanning offices, labs, and live data center sites.
• Collaborative culture working across multi-disciplinary engineering teams.