Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Groq is hiring a Sr./Staff Network Design Engineer to architect, design, validate, and evolve network infrastructure for its AI compute environments. The role owns scalable network designs and establishes engineering standards, design patterns, tooling, and technical direction in partnership with infrastructure and operations teams.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end network design process, translating customer compute, workload, scale, and tenancy requirements into production-ready” architectures for AI training and inference
- Work closely with software teams building inference and training stacks to align network topology with stack architecture
- Develop network architectures, high-level designs (HLDs), low-level designs (LLDs), review bill of materials (BOMs), and implementation standards leveraging industry and vendor reference architectures
- Design spine-leaf/Clos fabrics across front-end, back-end, and storage networks, with a focus on performance, resiliency, scalability, and operational simplicity
- 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 before introducing new architectures into production
- Define failure scenarios and validate network behavior during link, device, control-plane, and site 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
Skills
- 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 optical networking fundamentals, transceivers, fiber infrastructure, and data center cabling
- Experience with network platforms and operating systems from vendors such as Arista, Cisco, Juniper, NVIDIA, or equivalent
- Experience with network automation and software development using Python and APIs
- Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, source control, automated testing, and CI/CD engineering practices
- Experience with network telemetry and observability technologies such as streaming telemetry, SNMP, flow data, and time-series monitoring
- Strong understanding of Linux networking and TCP/IP fundamentals
- Demonstrated ability to develop architecture documents, design standards, implementation plans, and technical specifications
- Ability to analyze complex systems and make sound architectural decisions involving performance, reliability, cost, and operational tradeoffs
- Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical decisions across engineering organizations
- Experience designing networks for AI/ML clusters, HPC environments, distributed computing systems, or large GPU/accelerator deployments
- Experience with very large-scale Ethernet fabrics and high-throughput east-west traffic patterns
- Knowledge of RDMA, Priority Flow Control (PFC), ECN, congestion management, and lossless or near-lossless Ethernet design
- Experience designing networks supporting distributed training or large-scale AI inference
- Familiarity with SONiC or other disaggregated/open networking platforms
- Experience with multi-site data center architecture and data center interconnect
- Experience working with cloud networking environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Familiarity with network source-of-truth and automation platforms such as NetBox, Nautobot, or equivalent systems
- Experience designing and operating infrastructure at hyperscale or in rapidly growing technology environments
- Specifically, they must qualify as U.S. Persons for export control purposes (i.e., U.S. citizen, U.S. lawful permanent resident (Green Card holder), or a protected individual under 8 U.S.C. § 1324b(a)(3) such as a refugee or asylee), or otherwise be eligible for an applicable export license
- Familiarity with backend technologies like Infiniband/RoCE/ Spectrum-X experience strongly preferred
Benefits
- Remote work while the local Groq office is being established; this role is expected to transition to onsite once the office opens.
- Long-Term Incentive (LTI) Program
- Purposeful hiring: teammates are handpicked with intention.
- Work that directly shapes the company’s trajectory.
- Mission-driven work.
- The opportunity to tackle complex and exciting challenges.
Company Overview