Manager Datacenter Network Engineering

Runpod is pioneering the future of AI and machine learning offering cutting-edge cloud infrastructure for full‑stack AI applications. Founded in 2022 we are a rapidly growing well‑funded remote‑first company with a global team across the US Canada and Europe. Our mission is to create a foundational platform that enables developers and companies to build deploy and scale custom AI systems with speed and flexibility.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager Datacenter Network Engineering to lead the team responsible for designing deploying and operating Runpod’s global datacenter and backbone network. This role manages engineers working on L2/L3 fabrics high-performance GPU networking and global WAN connectivity that underpin our AI platform.

You will lead execution across multiple regions and vendors while setting technical direction for network architecture that supports massive east-west traffic low-latency GPU collectives and secure multi-tenant isolation. This role is hands-on at the architectural level while focused on team leadership operational excellence and scalability.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Datacenter Networking Team: Manage and grow a team of network engineers responsible for datacenter fabrics interconnects and global WAN connectivity. Provide mentorship technical guidance and clear ownership boundaries.
• Own Datacenter Network Architecture: Define and evolve network designs for GPU-heavy clusters including spine-leaf topologies ECMP routing and high-bandwidth east-west traffic patterns.
• High-Performance GPU Networking: Oversee design and operation of InfiniBand and RoCE-based fabrics supporting distributed training and inference workloads. Ensure performance loss characteristics and congestion control meet AI workload requirements.
• Encapsulation & Overlay Protocols: Guide implementation and operations of encapsulation technologies such as VXLAN EVPN Geneve or similar enabling scalable multi-tenant isolation and flexible network provisioning.
• Global WAN & Backbone Connectivity: Lead strategy and execution for global WAN connectivity including private backbone links IX connectivity and hybrid connectivity with cloud providers and partners.
• Reliability & Operations: Establish operational best practices for monitoring capacity planning change management incident response and post-mortems across the network stack.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Infrastructure SRE Hardware and Product Engineering teams to ensure network capabilities align with platform and customer requirements.
• Vendor & Partner Management: Work with hardware vendors colocation providers and transit partners on network design procurement deployment timelines and escalations.
• Security & Segmentation: Ensure network designs support secure isolation DDoS resilience and compliance requirements without compromising performance.

Requirements

• Engineering Leadership Experience: 3+ years managing network or infrastructure engineering teams with experience scaling teams and systems in production environments.
• Datacenter Networking Expertise: 8+ years designing and operating large-scale datacenter networks including spine-leaf architectures BGP-based routing and high-throughput fabrics.
• Encapsulation & Overlays: Strong hands-on experience with VXLAN/EVPN or equivalent encapsulation protocols including control-plane and data-plane considerations.
• High-Performance Networking: Proven experience with InfiniBand and/or RoCE including congestion management lossless Ethernet concepts and performance tuning for GPU workloads.
• Global WAN Experience: Deep familiarity with global WAN technologies including private backbone design inter-region connectivity routing policy and traffic engineering.
• Linux & Network OS Fluency: Comfortable working with Linux-based systems network operating systems and automation tooling.
• Operational Excellence: Strong background in network observability incident management capacity forecasting and change control.
• Communication & Leadership: Clear written and verbal communication skills with the ability to align stakeholders and lead teams through complex technical challenges.
• Successful completion of a background check.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating networks for GPU clusters HPC environments or AI/ML platforms.
• Familiarity with RDMA tuning NCCL traffic patterns and distributed training communication models.
• Experience with automation frameworks and network-as-code (e.g. Terraform Ansible internal tooling).
• Background in multi-region or multi-cloud networking architectures.
• Experience working in high-growth or hyperscale infrastructure environments.

• The competitive base pay for this position ranges from ($150000 - $240000). This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Runpod and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors including the candidate’s experience qualifications and location
• Meaningful equity in a fast-growing company- everyone on the team receives stock options — your impact drives our growth and you share in the upside.
• Generous medical dental & vision plans — we cover 100% for all employees and partial for dependents. 
• Flexible PTO- take the time you need to recharge
• Most roles are remote work first with an inclusive collaborative teams utilizing slack as the main form of internal communication 
• Join a passionate team on the cutting edge of AI infrastructure — where culture learning and ownership are at the heart of how we scale.

Runpod is committed to maintaining a workplace free from discrimination and upholding the principles of equality and respect for all individuals. We believe that diversity in all its forms enhances our team. As an equal opportunity employer Runpod is committed to creating an inclusive workforce at every level. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin age marital status protected veteran status disability status or any other characteristic protected by law. We welcome every qualified candidate eligible to work in the United States; however we are currently unable to sponsor employment visas

What We Do

Runpod is pioneering the future of AI and machine learning offering cutting-edge cloud infrastructure for full-stack AI applications. Founded in 2022 we are a rapidly growing well-funded company with a remote-first organization spread globally. Our mission is to empower innovators and enterprises to unlock AI's true potential driving technology and transforming industries. Join us as we shape the future of AI. We are building Cloud services focused on accelerating AI adoption. Whether you're an experienced ML developer training a large language model or an enthusiast tinkering with stable diffusion we strive to make GPU compute as seamless and affordable as possible.

Why Work With Us

Our Guiding Virtues Give a sh*t - We want to work with people who care - about our customers and about each other. Look in the mirror - We deeply reflect on our own actions and seek to better ourselves. Courage over comfort - We tackle hard truths and tough situations directly even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Gallery