Principal Network Engineer (AI Infrastructure)

Location: Seattle, United States

Salary: $270,000–$330,000 USD per year, plus potential bonus, equity, and/or commission.

Company

Nscale provides GPU cloud infrastructure for AI startups and enterprise customers, including the platforms and networking systems that support large-scale AI workloads.

What you will do

• Define, design, validate, and evolve InfiniBand, RoCE, and high-performance Ethernet fabrics at rack, row, and data center scale.
• Set technical direction for BGP, EVPN-VXLAN, LACP, QoS, Clos, and spine-leaf architectures across multiple sites.
• Design perimeter and security infrastructure, including firewalls, NAT, VPN, security policies, high availability, and multi-tenant segmentation.
• Lead GitOps-based network automation using Python, Ansible, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Drive observability, telemetry, monitoring, alerting, root-cause analysis, SLOs, and operational improvements.
• Partner with deployment, data center operations, platform, systems, storage, and vendor teams while mentoring engineers and leading technical escalations.

Requirements

• 10+ years of network engineering experience, including significant experience in HPC, AI, hyperscale, or large-scale data center environments.
• Hands-on RDMA-aware networking experience for AI/HPC workloads, including InfiniBand and/or RoCE, subnet managers such as OpenSM or UFM, and fabric orchestration.
• Expert knowledge of BGP, EVPN-VXLAN, Clos/spine-leaf architectures, and production platforms such as Cumulus, Nokia, or Arista EOS.
• Strong experience with Python, Ansible, Git-based workflows, Terraform, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions.
• Deep experience with Juniper SRX and/or Palo Alto firewalls, security policy architecture, high availability, and multi-tenant segmentation.
• Proven ability to define architecture and technical strategy, lead complex incidents, communicate trade-offs, and mentor engineers across networking, systems, storage, and AI/HPC teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Engineering culture focused on innovation, ownership, accountability, transparency, and operational excellence.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits.
• Flexible paid time off and parental leave.
• Retirement plan participation.
• Potential bonus, equity, and/or commission eligibility.