Staff Front-End Network Engineer

Nscale · Houston, New York City, San Francisco

Apply on the company website

About Nscale

Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud strengthens technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.

We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you’ll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you’ll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future.

About The Role

The Network Operations and Engineering teams at Nscale operate some of the most demanding networking environments in the industry, supporting large-scale AI GPU clusters where network performance directly impacts customer outcomes.

We’re looking for a Staff Front End Network Engineer – AI Infrastructure to provide deep technical leadership within Nscale’s front-end networking domain.

This role focuses on owning and evolving the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of our high-performance Ethernet front-end networks. These networks support inference traffic, cluster management, data ingress/egress, shared storage connectivity, long-haul circuits, and carrier handoffs.

You will act as a key technical leader and domain expert, driving architecture decisions, improving operational practices, and helping solve the most complex networking challenges in the front-end network stack. While not the ultimate technical authority, you will significantly influence design direction and cross-team outcomes.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Leading technical direction and operational improvements for Nscale’s front-end AI infrastructure networks within your domain

• Designing, reviewing, and evolving large-scale Ethernet leaf-spine / Clos fabric architectures (Arista and Nokia platforms) to support growth, inference workloads, and storage requirements

• Serving as a senior escalation point for complex front-end network incidents and driving deep technical root cause analysis and remediation

• Driving cross-team initiatives to improve fabric reliability, performance consistency, observability, and operational maturity

• Defining and evolving engineering standards for hardware configuration, routing, congestion management, firmware lifecycle, automation, and change safety across Nvidia Cumulus, Arista EOS, and Nokia platforms

• Partnering with SRE, Compute Platform, Storage, and Network Architecture teams to influence end-to-end system design, including DCI and storage networking integration

• Mentoring senior engineers and contributing to the growth of technical excellence across the organization

• Delivering measurable improvements in uptime, latency consistency, capacity efficiency, and incident reduction for front-end services

About You (Skills / Qualifications)

• 10–12+ years of experience in network engineering, with a strong focus on hyperscale data center, cloud, or AI infrastructure networking

• Deep hands-on experience with large-scale Ethernet data center fabrics (leaf-spine / Clos topologies)

• Strong production expertise with Nvidia (Cumulus), Arista EOS, and/or Nokia platforms at scale

• Solid understanding of data center routing and control planes (BGP, OSPF, ECMP, EVPN-VXLAN)

• Experience with long-haul circuits, DCI, and optical transport (dark fiber, carrier Ethernet, coherent optics, ZR/ZR+)

• Strong understanding of storage networking over Ethernet in large-scale environments

• Ability to debug and resolve complex cross-layer issues across hardware, optics, routing, and application layers

• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives across teams and influence outcomes without formal authority

• Strong systems thinking, balancing performance, reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency

Nice to Have

• Experience operating Arista, Nokia, or Nvidia networking platforms at hyperscale

• Familiarity with AI infrastructure network design patterns (inference, management, storage tiers)

• Exposure to DCI / long-haul optical or carrier network design and operations

• Strong automation experience (Python, Ansible, telemetry pipelines, validation frameworks)

• Experience contributing to infrastructure strategy or large-scale platform improvements

What We Can Offer You

At Nscale, you'll find a collaborative, supportive, and innovative environment where your contributions create real impact. We're building something extraordinary, and we want you at the core.

• Highly competitive package (base + equity) with annual reviews

• Opportunity to join a fast-growing AI infrastructure company and work on cutting-edge systems

• A progression path tailored to your growth, with opportunities to lead, innovate, and expand your technical scope

• Flexible benefits including medical, dental, vision, PTO, parental leave, and retirement plans

More jobs at Nscale · Infrastructure & IT jobs in Houston