HPC Network Engineer

Contract: 6 months

IR35: Inside IR35

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Private Cloud HPC Network Engineer to join a newly formed Private Cloud team, responsible for designing, deploying and operating a new greenfield on-premises private cloud based on OpenStack.

You will play a key role in designing, building and evolving the high-performance network architecture underpinning the platform, supporting demanding HPC workloads.

This is a hands-on technical role combining deep data-centre and HPC networking expertise with modern cloud networking, software-defined infrastructure and automation. You will work closely with compute, storage and platform engineering teams to deliver a scalable, resilient and highly automated cloud infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and evolve network architecture, standards and patterns for large-scale OpenStack Private Cloud and HPC environments.
• Develop scalable Leaf-Spine architectures using BGP, EVPN, VXLAN and ECMP.
• Design high-performance networking for compute, storage and latency-sensitive workloads.
• Evaluate technologies including RoCE, RDMA, SR-IOV, SmartNICs, DPUs and high-performance Ethernet.
• Integrate physical network infrastructure with OpenStack networking services including Neutron, OVN and ML2.
• Define network architecture for virtual machines, bare-metal workloads and Kubernetes platforms.
• Perform network performance analysis, optimisation, benchmarking and technical evaluation of networking technologies and vendors.
• Lead network security architecture and threat modelling.
• Troubleshoot complex cross-domain issues spanning networking, compute, storage and HPC applications.

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong experience designing and supporting high-performance or large-scale compute environments using RoCE, RDMA or InfiniBand.
• Strong experience with Cisco NX-OS and/or Arista EOS.
• Deep understanding of BGP, Leaf-Spine architectures, Layer 2/Layer 3 networking, ECMP, EVPN, VXLAN and network resilience.
• Experience with technologies such as SmartNICs, DPUs and NVMe-over-Fabrics.
• Practical experience with OpenStack networking services and API-driven network automation.
• Strong HPC network observability, troubleshooting and performance tuning skills.

Nice to Have

• Strong Linux and Kubernetes networking knowledge.
• Exposure to SR-IOV and DPDK.
• Hands-on Python, Ansible and Terraform experience.
• Experience applying SRE principles, including SLI/SLO development and error budgets.