Staff Network Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Network Engineer (AI Fabric, Datacenter and Edge Networking) based in France.

This is a Staff-level networking role responsible for designing and operating infrastructure powering large-scale AI and GPU workloads.
You’ll own the architecture and operational strategy for high-performance AI fabrics, datacenter networks, edge connectivity, and inter-datacenter transport.
The role combines deep technical ownership with hands-on execution across design, deployment, automation, troubleshooting, and reliability.
You’ll work on demanding networking challenges involving RoCE, RDMA, high-speed Ethernet, GPU communication, routing, security, and optical transport.
As the primary networking specialist, you’ll have significant influence over architectural standards, deployment patterns, and the evolution of the networking function.
You’ll collaborate closely with compute, platform, storage, SRE, observability, operations, and datacenter teams in a fast-scaling environment.
This is an opportunity to shape networking foundations for distributed AI infrastructure while raising the technical bar across the wider engineering organization.

Accountabilities

• Own the long-term technical direction, architecture, and operational strategy for high-performance AI networking and broader infrastructure networking.
• Design, deploy, and operate GPU networking fabrics optimized for distributed AI training and inference workloads.
• Architect large-scale RoCE and Ethernet fabrics, including leaf-spine, fat-tree, rail, and multi-plane topologies.
• Optimize east-west networking for GPU communication patterns and high-throughput distributed workloads, working closely with compute and platform teams.
• Implement and operate technologies including RDMA, RoCE, high-bandwidth Ethernet, Spectrum-X, and related AI networking platforms.
• Define reusable reference architectures, design principles, deployment standards, validation criteria, and operational patterns for future AI fabric deployments.
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs across performance, resilience, scalability, cost, operability, and deployment speed, providing clear recommendations to stakeholders.
• Design and operate Layer 2 and Layer 3 datacenter networks using technologies such as BGP, ECMP, EVPN/VXLAN, VLAN, VRF, OVS/OVN, and Linux networking.
• Build scalable routing, segmentation, overlay, tenant-isolation, and north-south traffic-management architectures.
• Design and maintain edge security and connectivity infrastructure, including WAF, TLS termination, DDoS mitigation, API gateways, and proxy protections.
• Design and operate private inter-datacenter connectivity, including dark fiber, metro fiber rings, DWDM transport, high-capacity WAN links, and redundant backbone architectures.
• Develop scalable principles for inter-site routing, redundancy, failure-domain isolation, and backbone evolution.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of networking initiatives, from architecture and lab validation through production deployment and operational handover.
• Collaborate with procurement and deployment teams on network bills of materials, datacenter layouts, rack elevations, capacity planning, performance modeling, and scaling strategies.
• Establish safe network-change practices, including deployment validation, rollback procedures, acceptance criteria, and minimal-impact production execution.
• Drive automation for provisioning, configuration management, monitoring, validation, and network lifecycle management using software engineering practices.
• Own network reliability and operational performance, defining and tracking SLAs, SLOs, latency, recovery, and other key reliability metrics.
• Serve as the senior escalation point for complex networking incidents, leading deep investigations, root-cause analysis, remediation, and long-term systemic improvements.
• Build network observability and operational tooling that improves visibility, reliability, and day-two operations.
• Act as the primary networking design authority, influencing platform architecture and helping adjacent teams understand how networking capabilities and constraints affect their decisions.
• Mentor engineers across adjacent domains and help establish the standards, practices, and technical foundations for the future networking organization.