Network Engineer

Ashburn, VA

$70–$75 Per Hour
Instant Apply

1 day ago

Job Description

Role Title: Network Engineer
Location: Onsite in Ashburn, VA
Duration: 9 Months

Role snapshot
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.

Numbers & Facts

Location	Ashburn, VA
Salary	$70–$75 Per Hour

Skills

802.1unmatched
Advertisingunmatched
Analysis Skillsunmatched
Apple Macsunmatched
Application Programming Interface (API)unmatched
Artificial Intelligence (AI)unmatched
Automationunmatched
Automation Systemsunmatched
BGPunmatched
Budget Managementunmatched
Chargebacksunmatched
Chef (Configuration Management)unmatched
Cisco Network Systemsunmatched
Cross-Functionalunmatched
Customer/Consumer Behaviorunmatched
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)unmatched
Establish Prioritiesunmatched
Ethernetunmatched
Expense Trackingunmatched
Hardware Debuggingunmatched
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers)unmatched
IPv4unmatched
IPv6unmatched
Identify Issuesunmatched
Incident Responseunmatched
Juniper Networks Product Familyunmatched
Laboratory Operationsunmatched
Linux Networksunmatched
Machine Toolunmatched
Metricsunmatched
Network Architecture/Engineeringunmatched
Network Operations Centerunmatched
Network Routersunmatched
Network Routingunmatched
Network Supportunmatched
Network System Hardwareunmatched
On Callunmatched
Onboardingunmatched
Opticsunmatched
Python Programming/Scripting Languageunmatched
Quality Monitoringunmatched
RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service)unmatched
Reconciliationunmatched
SERDESunmatched
Source Code/Configuration Management (SCM)unmatched
Test Labunmatched
Topologyunmatched
VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network)unmatched
Vendor/Supplier Evaluationunmatched

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