Nscale on cord

Nscale

Principal Network Engineer

External position
Hiring internally for Nscale?
Cloud and Infrastructure · Machine Learning and AI
Nscale is the Hyperscaler engineered for AI.
Posted
2 weeks ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Network Engineer
Experience level: Senior, Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Network Security, Python
Other skills considered: Ansible, CI/CD

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We are hiring a Principal Network Engineer to act as a senior technical authority for Nscale's AI-optimised network infrastructure.

Our Network Engineering team is responsible for the design, validation, and ongoing operation of the networking services underpinning both our internal management platform and customer-facing cloud infrastructure. This includes high-performance Ethernet fabrics, InfiniBand, RoCE, WAN connectivity, and large-scale data centre networking.

In this role, you'll set technical direction across the low-latency, high-bandwidth networks supporting large-scale AI training and inference workloads. You'll own critical technical domains end-to-end and help raise the bar for architecture, automation, operational rigour, and engineering standards across Nscale.

This is a deeply technical Principal-level role combining hands-on engineering with broad architectural influence. You'll define reference architectures, drive consistency across sites, lead complex technical decisions and escalations, and mentor engineers while partnering closely with Deployment, Data Centre Operations, Platform Engineering, Systems, Storage, and technology vendors.


What you'll be doing

AI & High-Performance Network Architecture

  • Define, design, validate, and evolve large-scale InfiniBand, RoCE, and Ethernet fabric architectures at rack, row, and data centre scale.
  • Design networks that integrate closely with bare-metal provisioning and cluster management systems.
  • Own technical direction for high-performance Ethernet fabrics, including BGP, EVPN, VXLAN, LACP, and QoS.
  • Establish reference architectures and engineering standards that can be implemented consistently across Nscale's data centre estate.
  • Identify systemic risks and architectural gaps and drive durable solutions that improve scalability, reliability, and operational simplicity.

Network Automation & Infrastructure as Code

  • Lead Nscale's network automation strategy using a GitOps operating model.
  • Build and guide Python and Ansible tooling for provisioning, configuration validation, compliance, and operational workflows.
  • Drive version-controlled configuration and CI/CD-based network change across multi-vendor environments.
  • Apply Infrastructure-as-Code and Network-as-Code principles to reduce manual intervention and improve operational consistency.
  • Continuously identify opportunities to automate repetitive operational tasks and reduce reactive toil.

Network Security & Edge Infrastructure

  • Design and engineer perimeter and network security infrastructure across WAN and data centre edge environments.
  • Own architecture across firewalls, NAT, VPN, security policies, and multi-tenant segmentation.
  • Design highly available and scalable security architectures appropriate for mission-critical AI infrastructure.

Reliability, Observability & Operations

  • Lead complex technical escalations and root-cause analysis for network performance, reliability, and stability issues.
  • Establish measurable SLOs and operational standards for network services.
  • Set technical direction for network observability, telemetry, monitoring, and alerting.
  • Ensure clear visibility into fabric health, traffic patterns, performance, and capacity.
  • Develop runbooks, automation, and engineering improvements that systematically reduce operational toil.
  • Act as a senior 3rd/4th line escalation point for complex networking issues.

Network Data & Configuration Management

  • Ensure the accuracy and reliability of source-of-truth network inventory and configuration data.
  • Establish structured engineering and change-management practices for network configuration.
  • Ensure network changes are controlled, auditable, repeatable, and scalable across multiple sites.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

  • Partner with Deployment, Data Centre Operations, Platform Engineering, Systems, Storage, and vendors on new site delivery and platform evolution.
  • Lead architecture and design reviews for significant network initiatives.
  • Mentor engineers and raise technical capability across the wider networking organisation.
  • Lead complex technical decisions and incidents spanning networking, systems, storage, and AI/HPC workloads.
  • Influence engineering strategy and standards across teams without relying on formal authority.

Required Experience

  • 10+ years of network engineering experience, with significant depth in HPC, AI, hyperscale, or large-scale data centre environments.
  • Extensive hands-on experience with RDMA-aware networking for AI/HPC workloads, including InfiniBand and/or RoCE.
  • Experience with subnet managers and fabric orchestration technologies such as OpenSM or NVIDIA UFM.
  • Expert-level understanding of modern data centre routing and control planes, including BGP, EVPN-VXLAN, and Clos/spine-leaf architectures.
  • Production experience with network platforms such as Cumulus, Nokia, or Arista EOS.
  • Strong network automation expertise using Python and Ansible.
  • Experience with Git-based workflows and modern Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD tooling such as Terraform, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions.
  • Deep experience designing and engineering firewall infrastructure using platforms such as Juniper SRX and/or Palo Alto.
  • Experience designing telemetry and observability solutions for high-throughput, performance-sensitive environments.
  • Proven ability to lead complex technical decisions and incidents across multiple engineering disciplines.

Architecture & Technical Leadership

  • Demonstrated experience defining network architecture, engineering standards, and technical strategy beyond a single project or data centre.
  • Ability to balance performance, reliability, operability, scalability, and delivery velocity when making technical decisions.
  • Experience influencing engineering teams and technical direction without formal authority.
  • Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to engineers, operators, and senior stakeholders.
  • Proven ability to mentor and develop other engineers through design reviews, technical guidance, incident leadership, and knowledge sharing.

Personal Attributes

  • Deeply technical and comfortable remaining hands-on at Principal level.
  • Highly analytical with a structured approach to solving complex infrastructure problems.
  • Strong sense of ownership and accountability.
  • Comfortable operating in a fast-paced environment where priorities and requirements evolve quickly.
  • Pragmatic and able to balance architectural excellence with business and delivery requirements.
  • Passionate about building next-generation infrastructure for AI and ML at scale.
Principal Network Engineer at Nscale
Position posted 2 weeks ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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