← All roles

Sr./Staff Network Design Engineer, AI/HPC

Groq· Network Eng
Apply on company site
Hybrid (Dallas–Fort Worth Area), Hybrid (San Francisco Bay Area), Hybrid (New York City Area)$270.4k - $401.6kFull-timePosted yesterday

About the role

Senior-level network design engineer for AI/HPC environments focusing on data center and AI infrastructure networks, automation, and scalable design patterns.

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 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 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.

Qualifications

  • 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.
  • Familiarity with backend technologies like Infiniband/RoCE/Spectrum-X (preferred)
  • 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.

Skills

Required:Network design and architectureData center fabric designNetwork protocols (BGP, EVPN, VXLAN, ECMP)Automation and IaCNetworking hardware and OSObservability and telemetryLinux networking fundamentals
Last updated Oct 25, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
Groq logo

About Groq

Groq was established in 2016 for one thing: inference.

Groq is a company focused on fast, affordable AI inference with custom silicon (LPU) for edge and data-center workloads.

BlogCareersCareers at GroqCommunityCustomer StoriesDemosDocsEnterprise Inquiry
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Groq