Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Network Infrastructure
fal · Remote · $180,000–$250,000 (stated in the posting)
fal is the generative media ecosystem powering the next generation of AI products. We build the infrastructure, tools, and model access that teams need to move from idea to production, and do it at scale without compromise. For developers and enterprises, fal is the foundation that makes generative media not just possible, but practical: a unified platform where high-performance inference, orchestration, and observability come together to unlock new categories of AI-native products.
As generative media reshapes industries across a market projected to grow by hundreds of billions over the next decade, fal is becoming the ecosystem that ambitious teams build on.
About this role:
You will build the public and private network infrastructure connecting all of fal's data centers and cloud environments, supporting both our public serverless platform and custom compute clusters. The scope includes internet routing, private connectivity, overlay networks, DNS, IP address management, cloud-provider integration, and high-performance Linux networking.
You will work across the networking stack — from BGP announcements and private peering to kernel-level performance tuning. The goal is to make our network fast, reliable, secure, isolated, and easy to operate.
What you'll do:
Design, build, validate, and operate public and private networks across the public platform and private compute clusters
Use AI aggressively to automate and accelerate network provisioning, configuration, validation, monitoring, and recovery
Manage ASNs, public IP prefixes, and private address space (allocation, registration, announcement, lifecycle)
Build and operate BGP routing: route policies, communities, filtering, traffic engineering, and failover
Announce customer and company IP ranges from physical infrastructure and cloud providers, including BYOIP integrations
Establish private peering with customers, partners, data centers, internet exchanges, and cloud providers
Build private and overlay networks using VXLAN, IPsec, WireGuard, and Tailscale
Operate DNS networking patterns including anycast DNS and mDNS
Tune the Linux networking stack for high throughput, low latency, and large connection counts
Build network observability and diagnostics using metrics, logs, flow data, active probes, and packet captures
Develop reusable tooling, standards, documentation, and runbooks
Collaborate with customers and internal teams to translate connectivity, security, isolation, and performance requirements into sound network designs
Qualifications/Nice to Have:
5+ years building and operating production network infrastructure
Strong Linux networking: routing tables, policy routing, network namespaces, bonding, VLANs, bridges, firewalling, NAT, conntrack
Deep BGP knowledge: route selection, communities, filtering, convergence, multipath, troubleshooting
Experience managing ASNs, public IP space, BGP announcements, IPAM, RPKI/ROAs, IRR records
Experience designing private IPv4/IPv6 address plans and preventing cross-customer/region conflicts
Production VXLAN overlay network experience
Production IPsec, WireGuard, or Tailscale experience
Experience with anycast DNS and mDNS
Experience with private peering and cloud provider interconnects
Linux networking performance tuning: congestion control, queue disciplines, socket buffers, MTU, NIC offloads, RSS/RPS/XPS, IRQ affinity
Packet-level troubleshooting: iproute2, tc, ethtool, tcpdump, Wireshark, mtr
Ansible or equivalent network configuration automation
EVPN as a VXLAN control plane
FRRouting, BIRD, or similar software-routing platforms
AWS Direct Connect, Google Cloud Interconnect, Azure ExpressRoute
Internet exchanges, cross-connects, route servers, colocation networking
DDoS detection, mitigation, scrubbing, BGP-based traffic diversion
eBPF, XDP, DPDK
NetBox, Nautobot, Nornir
Authoritative or recursive DNS infrastructure at scale
Network hardware: Arista, Juniper, Cisco
Kubernetes networking, service load balancing, CNI
Python or Go
What we offer at fal
Interesting and challenging work
A lot of learning and growth opportunities
We offer visa sponsorship and will help you relocate to San Francisco.
Health, dental, and vision insurance (US)
Regular team events and offsites
Compensation
$180,000 - $250,000 + equity + comprehensive benefits package
U.S. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY INFORMATION:
fal provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by applicable law.