Sr./Staff Network Design Engineer, AI/HPC
$270k - $402k • New York, United States • full_time
Posted 10d ago
About the job
Groq is building high-performance AI infrastructure designed to make inference fast, predictable, and scalable. Our infrastructure teams design and operate the systems that connect compute, data, and services at significant scale. We are looking for a Sr./Staff Network Engineer, AI/HPC to help architect, design, validate, and evolve the network infrastructure supporting Groq's rapidly growing AI compute environments. As a Sr./Staff Network Design Engineer, you will own network architecture and design across high-performance data center and AI infrastructure environments. You will translate capacity, performance, reliability, and business requirements into scalable network designs that can be deployed and operated consistently. This role requires deep expertise in data center networking, routing protocols, network architecture, automation, and large-scale infrastructure. You will work closely with network operations, data center engineering, compute, platform, security, and infrastructure teams to take designs from concept through validation and production deployment.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end network design process, translating requirements into production-ready architectures for AI training and inference.
- Work closely with software teams to align network topology with stack architecture.
- Develop network architectures, high-level designs (HLDs), low-level designs (LLDs), and review bill of materials (BOMs).
- Design spine-leaf/Clos fabrics across front-end, back-end, and storage networks.
- Evaluate and implement technologies such as BGP, EVPN, VXLAN, ECMP, IPv4/IPv6, QoS.
- Develop strategies for data center interconnect, WAN connectivity, internet edge, cloud connectivity, and external peering.
- Perform network capacity planning and traffic engineering for high-bandwidth AI and distributed compute workloads.
- Partner with compute and infrastructure engineering teams to understand workload communication patterns and translate them into network requirements.
- Establish standards for network hardware platforms, topology, addressing, routing policy, configuration, and lifecycle management.
- Evaluate switches, optics, cabling architectures, network operating systems, and emerging networking technologies.
- Build lab environments, proofs of concept, and design-validation frameworks.
- Define failure scenarios and validate network behavior during failures.
- Drive network automation and infrastructure-as-code practices using technologies such as Python, Ansible, Git, APIs, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Develop automated design validation, configuration generation, compliance, and testing capabilities.
- Establish network observability requirements, including telemetry, performance metrics, alerting, and capacity visibility.
- Lead technical reviews and provide guidance on complex network architecture and design decisions.
- Troubleshoot complex performance and reliability issues that span network, compute, hardware, and distributed systems.
- Partner with operations teams to ensure designs are supportable, observable, and safe to operate at scale.
- Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar for network architecture, automation, documentation, and engineering practices.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in network engineering, architecture, or infrastructure engineering, with significant experience designing large-scale data center networks.
- Deep understanding of TCP/IP, BGP and modern data center routing architectures.
- Strong experience designing leaf-spine / Clos network fabrics.
- Experience with EVPN/VXLAN and modern network virtualization architectures.
- Strong understanding of ECMP, routing convergence, failure domains, traffic engineering, and network resiliency.
- Experience designing networks with high-bandwidth Ethernet platforms, including 100G, 400G, or higher-speed interfaces.
- Strong knowledge of optics.