Network Engineer

Job Title: Network Engineer

Location: Huntsville, AL Onsite

Duration: Contract

Job Description:

You support the networks inside hardware validation labs around the world: the datacenter

fabrics, timing, optical, and provisioning systems that let accelerator teams validate new

platforms from first bring-up through production handoff. L2/L3 lab fabric design, precision

timing as a service, intent based provisioning and automation, optical plus test infrastructure, lab

operations and reliability, and cost takeout through decommissioning.

Required: network engineering

● L2/L3 at depth: VLANs, loop prevention, LAG, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, SLAAC and router

advertisements, DHCP relay and helpers, PXE boot flows end to end.

● BGP: eBGP peering design, prefix policy, uplink preference tuning, per-rack or per-site

route origination toward the border and aggregation layer.

● Datacenter fabrics: leaf/spine role design, EVPN/VXLAN overlays, migrating racks from

L2 bridged to L3 routed boundaries.

● IPv6 operations: first-hop security (RA guard, address locking), DHCPv6 relay and

MAC-stable allocation behavior including client identifier pitfalls, /64 per rack scale

planning and fabric design

● Precision timing: PTP (IEEE 1588) design and troubleshooting, grandmaster placement,

boundary and transparent clock concepts, sync quality monitoring against microsecond

budgets.

● Fabrics for AI/HPC: PFC and lossless Ethernet tuning, link training, SerDes and optics

basics (current generation high speed optics), awareness of how skew and tail latency

hit collective communication.

● Optical and physical plant: fiber types and connectors, optical circuit switching concepts,

commercial traffic generators, cable validation, fiber characterization from hardware

timestamps.

● Access security: port ACLs, 802.1X/MAB flows, RADIUS, quarantine and remediation

VLANs, device onboarding and registration.

● Multi-vendor fluency: deep on at least one datacenter NOS (Arista, Cisco, Juniper,

SONiC) with demonstrated ability to pick up others, including API driven operation with

rollback.

● Troubleshooting under pressure: packet level debugging, hardware timestamp analysis,

method of procedure authorship, maintenance windows, rollback planning.

Required: automation and software

● Python for network automation: device APIs, text templating, input validation, operator

CLI tooling.

● Templating: Jinja2 template design (reuse across sites and roles, safe defaults, per-port

rendering from inventory).

● Config as code: distributed revision control fluency (branch, review, land, revert), config

review culture, CI gates on generated config (diff review, automated land criteria).

● Intent modeling: declarative source of truth thinking where inventory plus intent renders

device config, and generated config is never hand edited.

● Linux networking: interfaces, routing tables, namespaces, capture tooling, service

management, cookbook style config management (chef).

● Data hygiene: inventory accuracy (roles, port maps, serial to port bindings), drift

detection, reconciliation loops.

Required: operations and delivery

● Lab or datacenter operations: oncall rotations, incident response, break/fix prioritization,

vendor RMAs, multi-site coordination.

● Change discipline: method of procedure authorship and peer review, blast radius control,

pilot then scale.

● Cost awareness: circuit inventories, carrier coordination for turn-down, tracking recurring

spend to zero with chargeback confirmation.

● Cross-functional delivery: shared ownership with platform teams (provisioning,

observability), hardware bring-up teams, and lab customers, including consultative

support outside the plan of record.

Preferred

● AI/HPC cluster networking: scale-up versus scale-out fabric design, RDMA capable

fabrics, collective sensitivity to timing.

● Large fiber plant or optical switching operations.

● IPv6-first or IPv6-only environments at scale.

● Observability: time series metrics, topology visualization, low-noise alert design.

● Vendor evaluation: switch selection criteria, optics compatibility testing.