Network Engineer

StartupJobs; Tipton; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

StartupJobs is seeking an experienced Network Engineer to design and optimize our data center networks across locations. You will engage with Tier 1 providers, IXs, and other operators to establish efficient peering strategies and cost-aware transit arrangements.

You will monitor network health, respond to incidents, and participate in hardware installations, with an on-call rotation to keep services highly available.

Qualifications

• You have operated networks at scale with many servers and high throughput.
• You have peering with IXs and private peers.
• You can troubleshoot across layers and manage incident response.

Responsibilities

• Design networks for data center locations, balancing hardware and software.
• Establish and optimize peering with Tier 1 transit providers and IXs.
• Monitor stability, mitigate abuse, and optimize transit costs.
• Participate in hardware installations and resolve real-world issues.
• Be on-call for network-related incidents and manage outages.

Skills

BGP

IPv6

VXLAN/EVPN

Linux networking

Tools

Arista gear

Dell gear

Juniper MX301

Job description

The challenge

• We’re building a global cloud-scale network to support our growing software products, and we need your help.

• We operate data centers across three time zones, with more locations likely coming soon.

• We previously outsourced our network management, but our growth now warrants a full-time in-house team that can keep pace with our fast-moving product engineering.

This might be for you if

• You’ve operated networks at scale. Think Nx Tbps, and thousands of physical servers or more.

• You’ve connected networks to Internet exchanges (IXs) and established private peerings.

• You’ve mitigated DDoS attacks. Too many times.

• You’re a pro with Arista and Dell gear. But you’ll find your way around any hardware.

• You’re comfortable with BGP, ECMP, BFD, VRRP, VLANs, LACP, MLAG, VXLAN/EVPN, IPv6, DNS64/NAT64, CoPP, RPKI, OVN, WireGuard, GRE, QoS, MTU, conntrack, and Linux networking. You understand how packets flow through switches, routers, hypervisors, and virtual machines. And you can troubleshoot at every layer.

• You’ve pulled off zero-downtime live migrations. And them were actually zero downtime.

• You have a great sense of humor! You’d tell us a UDP joke, but we wouldn’t get it.

• You have a sysadmin or engineering background and can keep pace with a team of talented engineers.

• You’re AI-native. You’re constantly improving your Claude Code setup to work smarter.

• You communicate clearly and confidently in English, both in writing and in conversation.

• You hate meetings and work async-first. Slack, Notion, Loom, and e-mail for external communication.

• Infrastructure as code is your default. Not an afterthought.

What you’ll do

• You’ll design networks for our existing and new data center locations, across both software and hardware. You’ll help guide our hardware purchases, aiming for the best price-to-performance ratio. Anyone can pick a Juniper MX301 out of a catalog. But what will you do when you find out the lead time is a year and it costs a kidney?

• You’ll work with Tier 1 transit providers, Internet exchanges, and other network operators to establish and optimize peering relationships.

• You’ll monitor network stability, prevent and mitigate abuse, and optimize transit costs.

• You’ll take part in hardware installations and deal with real-world issues.

• You’ll be on-call for network-related issues. Don’t worry, we know a thing or two about incident management.

Who you’ll work with

• Juraj, our CEO; Tomas, our CTO; and Veronika, our COO. All technical, all software engineers.

• Our distributed team of stellar software engineers optimizing our products for your network.

• Our data center team responsible for installing and debugging hardware. They move fast and get sh*t done. Picture an F1 pit crew. That’s what our data center installations often look like.

• Generally speaking, we consider ourselves a professional sports team. Everyone aims to be the best in the world at what they do. From YC alumni to ex-Google and ex-Shopify colleagues, you’ll be in great company.

• We hope to learn a lot from you, and we’re sure you’ll learn a lot from us, too.

SmartStack, Dell OpenManage, BGP, VLAN, Cisco CCNA 1: Networking Fundamentals, Cisco Routers, Cisco Routing & Switching, Cisco Networking, Cisco Certified, Cisco Network Devices, Datacentres, Network Administration, Network Security, Network Design