Senior Principal AI Networking Validation Engineer

Upscale AI, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Upscale, Inc. is building the high-performance infrastructure powering the next generation of AI workloads.

As a senior validator, you own how data-path features are qualified on our scale-up AI networking platform, from the SAI/SDK path through ASIC forwarding and traffic-management behavior. You set the test strategy, own feature readiness and release sign-off, debug the hardest cross-stack failures, and grow the QA engineers around you.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in networking software, system validation, or ASIC/platform QA.
• Deep hands-on traffic management: PFC, scheduling, buffers, classification and marking, queueing, ECN/WRED.
• Strong L2/L3 and ACL fundamentals, and experience with a switch SDK or NOS such as SONiC or FBOSS.
• Ownership of validation frameworks and automation, not only test execution.
• Python or Go at framework-review level; solid Linux and packet- and counter-level debugging.
• Proven mentoring and influence as an IC, with clear written readiness and root-cause reports.

Responsibilities

• Classification and marking: DSCP and 802.1p to traffic class, trust, TC-to-queue, remarking, port versus switch map binding.
• Queueing: unicast and multicast queues, counters, occupancy, watermarks, drops.
• Scheduling: strict priority, WRR/DWRR, shaping, rate limiting, fairness under oversubscription.
• Buffering: ingress and egress pools, thresholds, headroom, reserved versus shared.
• PFC and lossless Ethernet: pause, headroom, lossless queues, storm and deadlock, DCB.
• ECN and WRED: thresholds, drop probability, ECT/CE, interaction with DCQCN under RoCEv2.
• Policing: color-blind and color-aware, CIR/PIR/CBS/PBS, trTCM.
• Forwarding and counters: L2/L3, ECMP, mirror and sample, telemetry.
• Own the validation strategy, test plans, coverage, and release entry/exit criteria.
• Qualify lossless and congestion behavior under RoCEv2 and GPU collectives at line rate.
• Build frameworks and debug tools, including model-based checks of outcomes.
• Lead root-cause analysis across software, SDK, model, silicon, and Linux.
• Mentor QA engineers and represent validation in design reviews and handoffs.
• Support customer deployments, proofs of concept, and field issues on data-path and congestion behavior.

Skills

Networking software

Traffic management

L2/L3 fundamentals

SAI / switch SDK

Python / Go

Linux debugging

Mentoring

Tools

SAI

NOS (SONiC)

FBOSS

Job description

Upscale, Inc. is building the high-performance infrastructure powering the next generation of AI workloads.

As a senior validator, you own how data-path features are qualified on our scale-up AI networking platform, from the SAI/SDK path through ASIC forwarding and traffic-management behavior. You set the test strategy, own feature readiness and release sign-off, debug the hardest cross-stack failures, and grow the QA engineers around you.