Senior HPC Deployment & Cable Validation Lead - AI Clusters

Vailexa; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Vailexa is seeking a Senior Data Center Deployment Engineer in Santa Clara, CA to lead rack-level infrastructure deployment for AI and HPC environments. You will validate cabling, power, and connectivity before handoff, while coordinating with network and Linux teams to rapidly isolate issues.

The role requires extensive experience with physical infrastructure, rack diagrams, and Tier-1 troubleshooting, ensuring high-quality deployments and scalable support for growth in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in data center deployment, HPC infrastructure installation, or large-scale hardware integration.
• Strong practical knowledge of structured cabling, optics, transceivers, breakout schemes, and rack-level physical validation.
• Experience reading and validating rack diagrams, patch plans, cable matrices, and topology documentation.
• Strong troubleshooting skill for Layer 1 issues that manifest as network instability, missing hosts, degraded performance, or failed cluster readiness checks.
• Experience with asset tracking, labeling discipline, and deployment quality control.
• Ability to work across physical infrastructure, server hardware, and network operations teams without losing detail.

Responsibilities

• Execute and coordinate rack-level deployment of compute, network, and storage infrastructure for AI and HPC environments.
• Validate rack elevations, port maps, cable maps, power distribution, labeling, and physical connectivity before cluster handoff.
• Perform detailed cable validation across Ethernet, InfiniBand, management, and storage interconnects.
• Detect and resolve cabling defects including polarity issues, incorrect port destinations, unsupported optics pairings, breakout errors, damaged media, and inconsistent labeling.
• Support hardware bring-up by validating BIOS baselines, BMC reachability, inventory accuracy, and initial connectivity tests.
• Partner with network and Linux teams during cluster turn-up to quickly isolate physical-layer versus logical-layer failures.
• Create deployment checklists, as-built documentation, and signoff criteria for production acceptance.
• Drive structured remediation during expansion, re-cabling, or failed build events.

Skills

Data center deployment

Structured cabling

Rack diagrams reading

Layer 1 troubleshooting

Asset tracking

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Vailexa is seeking a Senior Data Center Deployment Engineer in Santa Clara, CA to lead rack-level infrastructure deployment for AI and HPC environments. You will validate cabling, power, and connectivity before handoff, while coordinating with network and Linux teams to rapidly isolate issues.

The role requires extensive experience with physical infrastructure, rack diagrams, and Tier-1 troubleshooting, ensuring high-quality deployments and scalable support for growth in a fast-paced environment.