Senior Network Engineer - InfiniBand / UFM
15% above the median for Senior Engineering roles
What We Are Looking For
We are seeking an experienced Senior Network Engineer (InfiniBand / UFM) to design, deploy, automate, and operate next-generation AI Factory networking infrastructure supporting large-scale GPU clusters. This role is responsible for building and maintaining high-performance NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand fabrics that power AI training and inference environments utilizing NVIDIA UFM, NCCL, RoCEv2, and modern data center technologies.
The ideal candidate has deep expertise in InfiniBand networking, NVIDIA Unified Fabric Manager (UFM), large-scale GPU deployments, Linux networking, automation, and troubleshooting distributed AI workloads. The network is the foundation of distributed AI training. Performance bottlenecks at the fabric layer directly impact customer workloads. This role will shape how Lightning scales from tens of thousands of GPUs to significantly beyond — ensuring deterministic performance, predictable scaling, and enterprise-grade reliability. If you want to architect infrastructure that powers frontier AI research, this is the role for you.
This role is hybrid with a minimum of 2 in-office days per week in San Francisco, Seattle, or NYC, with fully remote work considered for candidates outside of our office hub locations. All employees participate in occasional team and company offsites.
What You’ll Do
Design, deploy, and maintain large-scale NVIDIA InfiniBand fabrics supporting AI/ML GPU clusters.
Deploy and administer NVIDIA Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) Enterprise for monitoring, provisioning, telemetry, and fabric health.
Configure and optimize NVIDIA Quantum and Quantum-2 InfiniBand switches.
Troubleshoot fabric performance issues impacting NCCL, MPI, GPUDirect RDMA, and AI training jobs.
Implement and validate fat-tree, Dragonfly+, Clos, and spine-leaf network architectures.
Perform firmware lifecycle management for InfiniBand switches, adapters (HCAs), and UFM infrastructure.
Optimize congestion control, adaptive routing, QoS, and traffic engineering for high-performance GPU communication.
Work closely with AI platform, GPU infrastructure, storage, and systems engineering teams to deploy scalable AI Factory environments.
Automate network provisioning using Python, Ansible, Git, REST APIs, and Infrastructure-as-Code methodologies.
Monitor network health using UFM telemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and other observability platforms.
Support high availability, maintenance windows, incident response, root cause analysis, and capacity planning.
Participate in architecture reviews and define networking standards for AI infrastructure.
What You'll Need
Required Qualifications
7+ years of experience in large-scale data center networking.
Experience deploying, operating, and troubleshooting InfiniBand environments.
Strong understanding of Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking, including BGP, EVPN, VXLAN, and spine-leaf architectures.
Strong Linux administration experience.
Experience with network automation using Python, Ansible, Terraform, or similar tools.
Experience with network troubleshooting, observability, and telemetry tooling.
Excellent troubleshooting, documentation, and communication skills.
Ideal Experience
Experience with Netris, Terraform, or similar infrastructure tooling.
Experience with multi-region backbone design.
Exposure to bare-metal provisioning systems.
Experience operating HPC, GPU-dense, or other large-scale infrastructure environments.
Experience working in high-growth infrastructure startups
CompensationWe are committed to offering competitive compensation that reflects the value each team member brings to our mission. Final offers are based on factors such as experience, skills, geographic location, and role expectations. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package for eligible roles includes a discretionary bonus, a meaningful equity component, and comprehensive benefits.
The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is:
$170,000—$210,000 USD