Senior Network Engineer, Edge & Optical Transport

What We Are Looking For

Lightning AI is seeking a Senior Network Engineer to own the operation, reliability, and growth of our edge network and optical transport infrastructure. You will manage Juniper PTX routers and Smartoptics M32 and M40 line systems, connecting our data centers, internet providers, peering partners, and external networks. This is a hands-on engineering role spanning IP routing and the optical layer that carries it.

You will build resilient connectivity for our AI infrastructure, improve operational visibility, and automate routine work. You will work closely with data center networking, compute, platform, and operations teams to deliver reliable connectivity as our infrastructure grows.

This role offers hybrid work from our San Francisco, Seattle, or NYC offices, or fully remote work within the U.S. All employees participate in occasional team and company offsites.

What You Will Do

• Operate, configure, and expand our Juniper PTX edge and backbone routers, including routing policy, interface provisioning, software upgrades, and configuration lifecycle management.
• Manage internet transit, private and public peering, and external connectivity using IPv4/IPv6, eBGP/iBGP, routing policy, prefix filtering, and route validation.
• Deploy and maintain Smartoptics M32 and M40 optical line systems for DWDM transport and data center interconnects, including wavelength provisioning, power-level checks, alarm monitoring, and capacity expansion.
• Troubleshoot failures across packet and optical layers, including route instability, packet loss, congestion, fiber loss, optical power issues, and degraded optical performance.
• Plan resilient paths and capacity across edge, backbone, and optical networks; validate failover behavior and identify shared failure risks.
• Coordinate circuit delivery, cross-connects, turn-ups, acceptance testing, and fault resolution with carriers, colocation providers, fiber vendors, and equipment support teams.
• Automate provisioning, configuration validation, backups, and operational checks using Python, Ansible, APIs, or similar tools.
• Improve telemetry and alerting for routing health, interface utilization, errors, optical performance, and service availability.
• Execute planned maintenance with documented validation and rollback procedures; participate in incident response and root cause analysis.
• Maintain network diagrams, circuit and wavelength inventories, IP addressing records, configuration standards, and operational runbooks.

What You Will Need

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience operating production edge, backbone, service provider, or large-scale data center networks.
• Hands-on experience with Juniper PTX routers and Junos OS/Evolved, including configuration, troubleshooting, upgrades, and routing policy management.
• Strong knowledge of IPv4/IPv6, BGP, internet routing, peering and transit, route filtering, and failure detection and convergence.
• Practical experience operating DWDM optical transport or open line systems, including wavelength planning, optical power budgets, fiber loss, and alarm troubleshooting.
• Ability to isolate faults across router interfaces, transceivers, optical line systems, fiber spans, and carrier circuits.
• Experience planning and turning up high-capacity Ethernet and data center interconnect services, with attention to redundancy and service acceptance.
• Experience using Python, Ansible, or similar tools to automate network operations and validate changes.
• Experience with network monitoring, telemetry, and capacity planning, and with executing production changes using validation and rollback plans.
• Strong documentation and communication skills; ability to independently prioritize work, coordinate with external providers, and own issues through resolution.

Ideal Experience

• Direct experience deploying and operating Smartoptics M32 and M40 line systems and their management tools.
• Experience with coherent optics, optical performance metrics such as OSNR and pre-FEC error rates, and fiber testing using optical power meters or OTDRs.
• Experience with multi-region backbone design, dark fiber services, carrier diversity, and data center interconnect architecture.
• Familiarity with routing security practices such as RPKI-based route origin validation, IRR filtering, and coordination with DDoS mitigation providers.
• Experience integrating edge networks with data center fabrics, cloud connectivity, or AI infrastructure environments.
• Experience working in a high-growth infrastructure company with a small team and a high degree of ownership.