{"id":3748964,"url":"https://alion.io/job/runware-ai-factory-network-architect","title":"AI Factory Network Architect","company":{"id":688350,"name":"Runware","domain":"runware.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/runware","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":10,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.2,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":49,"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US","GB"],"hiring_countries_total":2,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"HPC","optional":false},{"name":"InfiniBand","optional":false},{"name":"KV Cache","optional":false},{"name":"NCCL","optional":false},{"name":"NVLink","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-04T14:33:38Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-04","last_verified_at":"2026-11-08T16:36:46Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"About Runware\nRunware is the AI inference platform that builds and runs its own infrastructure, end to end. Our Sonic Inference Engine has served more than 20 billion requests for over 1 million developers and 500 million end users, with 400,000+ models behind a single integration, at up to 10x lower cost per token than traditional providers.\nWe are now building the AI Factory that runs it. The Sonic Inference Pod packs 1 MW of custom-designed compute into a 20-foot container with closed-loop, water-free cooling, sited wherever power exists. Pods are live in the US and Europe, and we are scaling to dozens of pods and tens of thousands of GPUs, all operated as one distributed fabric that reroutes traffic the moment a pod goes offline (announcement).\nThe network is what turns those pods into a supercomputer. That is the job.\nThe role\nAs AI Factory Network Architect, you will own the network architecture of Runware's AI supercomputer, from the NVLink domain inside a server to the optical links between pods on two continents. You will set the design, build the first systems with your own hands, and grow the team that runs them.\nThis is a hands-on leadership role, not a slide-deck role. You will specify the fabrics, validate them on real hardware, debug the first congestion collapse at 3 a.m., and then write the standard so it never happens again. You will work directly with our hardware, platform, and inference engineering teams, with NVIDIA and our optical and switching vendors, and with the site teams deploying pods.\nSuccess means inference traffic flows across tens of thousands of GPUs at line rate, pods join the fabric in days rather than weeks, and a failure anywhere in the network is invisible to the developer calling our API.\nWhat you'll do\nOwn the end-to-end network architecture for the AI Factory: the scale-up fabric (NVLink and NVSwitch domains), the scale-out fabric (InfiniBand and RoCE), the storage and management networks, and the pod-to-pod and inter-site backbone.\nDesign the optical layer: transceiver and cable selection, co-packaged and linear-drive optics evaluation, DWDM for pod-to-pod and metro links, and the link budgets and reliability targets behind them.\nDefine the reference network design for the Sonic Inference Pod so every new pod ships with a validated, repeatable fabric and joins the global network in days.\nBuild and bring up the first fabrics yourself: rail-optimized topologies, subnet manager and routing configuration, adaptive routing, congestion control, QoS, and GPUDirect RDMA tuning, measured against inference throughput and tail latency rather than synthetic benchmarks.\nWork with the inference engine team so the Sonic Inference Engine's traffic patterns, from tensor- and pipeline-parallel collectives to KV-cache transfer and multi-node serving, drive topology and buffer decisions, not the other way round.\nRun capacity planning and the vendor roadmap with NVIDIA, switch and optics suppliers, and carriers; negotiate technical specifications and lead evaluations of new fabric generations.\nSet the operating standard: telemetry, link-health monitoring, failure-domain design, automated fault isolation, and runbooks that let a small team operate tens of thousands of ports.\nHire and lead a team of network engineers as the footprint grows, and act as the final technical escalation for fabric incidents across all sites.\nRequirements\nWhat we're looking for\n15+ years designing, building, and operating high-performance networks, with a significant part of that in HPC or AI supercomputers at the scale of thousands of GPUs or more.\nDeep, hands-on InfiniBand experience: fabric design, subnet management, routing engines, adaptive routing, congestion control, and performance debugging at the port and queue-pair level.\nWorking knowledge of NVLink and NVSwitch domains and how scale-up and scale-out fabrics interact for multi-GPU and multi-node inference and training.\nOptical networking depth: transceivers and cabling at 400G and 800G, link budgets, DWDM and coherent optics for inter-site links, and the operational realities of optics at scale (failure rates, cleaning, inventory).\nHands-on RDMA experience across InfiniBand and RoCE, including GPUDirect, NCCL and collective behaviour, PFC and ECN tuning, and the trade-offs between the two.\nA track record of leading network teams through greenfield builds and production incidents, and of being the person engineers call when the fabric is doing something nobody understands.\nComfort automating everything: Python or Go, infrastructure as code, and telemetry pipelines rather than CLI sessions.\nClear writing and the ability to turn a design into a document that a site team on another continent can execute from.\nWillingness to travel to pod sites in the US and Europe for bring-up and major changes.\nStrong differentiators\nExperience with NVIDIA Spectrum-X, Quantum-X800, or Blackwell-generation NVLink systems, or the equivalent from a hyperscaler's in-house stack.\nHands-on time with co-packaged optics, linear-drive pluggables, or photonic switching evaluations.\nExperience designing networks for modular or containerized data centers, edge sites, or deployments with constrained power and space.\nBackground in inference-specific traffic patterns: disaggregated prefill and decode, KV-cache transfer, and multi-tenant serving across a shared fabric.\nContributions to SONiC, OpenFabrics, UEC, or similar open networking efforts.\nExperience with sovereign or data-residency network designs, including inter-site encryption and segmentation.\nPrior work at a GPU cloud, hyperscaler, national lab, or AI lab building its own supercomputer.\nBenefits\nWhy Runware\nYou will design the network for an AI supercomputer that is being built right now, with the budget, the hardware, and the mandate to do it properly. Few network architects get to own a fabric from the first pod to the global backbone, with a direct line to the people deciding what the next pod looks like.\nWe're a remote-first collective, meeting in person twice a year to plan, brainstorm, celebrate wins, and enjoy some face-to-face time. We have core hours for cooperative working and calls, but outside of that your calendar is yours. Work the hours that let you perform at your peak while also building a healthy life.\nOur release cycles are fast and intense, but they're followed by real downtime. After big pushes we expect the team to unplug, recharge, and come back ready and stronger than ever for the next leap.\nGenerous paid time off: vacation, sick days, public holidays\nMeaningful stock options: share in the upside you create\nFlexible hours: own your schedule outside core collaboration blocks\nFamily leave: paid maternity, paternity, and caregiver time\nCompany retreats: twice-yearly gatherings in inspiring locations","description_format":"text","description_chars":6834,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Parental leave","Stock options"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Generative Image"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-04T14:33:38Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":49,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/runware-ai-factory-network-architect","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/runware-ai-factory-network-architect.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-08T19:16:42Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":40247,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-09T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":688350},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=688350"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Frunware-ai-factory-network-architect"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Frunware-ai-factory-network-architect"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Frunware-ai-factory-network-architect"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/runware-ai-factory-network-architect\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Frunware-ai-factory-network-architect"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3748964}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"runware.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3748964},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}