{"id":562680,"url":"https://alion.io/job/span-data-center-network-architect","title":"Data Center Network Architect","company":{"id":5825,"name":"SPAN","domain":"span.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/span","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":16,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":102,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"Networking","role_family":"Networking","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":175000,"max":230000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":230000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"BGP","optional":false},{"name":"HPC","optional":false},{"name":"InfiniBand","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"NCCL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"TCP/IP","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-08T22:53:42Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-26","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T14:18:17Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":51,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":1,"flags":[],"days_open":50},"description":"Our Mission\nSPAN is enabling electrification for all\nXFRA by SPAN is the first distributed data center using existing infrastructure and underutilized power capacity to meet expanding AI compute demand.\nDecarbonization is the process to reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, from entering our atmosphere.\n\nElectrification is the process of replacing fossil fuel appliances that run on gas or oil with all-electric upgrades for a cleaner way to power our lives.\n\nAt SPAN, we believe in:\nEnabling homes and vehicles powered by clean energy\n\nMaking electrification upgrades possible\n\nBuilding more resilient homes with reliable backup\n\nDesigning a flexible and distributed electrical grid\n\nThe Role\nWe are looking for a Network Architect to own the design, deployment, and operation of the network connecting XFRA’s distributed compute fleet.\nYour scope will span high-performance networking within GPU clusters, north-south connectivity between compute sites and customers, and the wide-area architecture connecting our fleet to cloud platforms and compute partners. You will turn workload requirements into practical designs that balance performance, availability, security, deployment speed, and cost.\nThis is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will select and configure equipment, qualify ISP services, automate deployments, troubleshoot production issues, and establish the standards that allow our network to scale. You will work closely with compute, orchestration, security, deployment and commercial teams.\nWhat you'll do\nOwn the network architecture. Develop reference designs for residential nodes and larger commercial GPU clusters, including routing, switching, security gateways, addressing, management access, physical connectivity, and capacity planning.\n\nEngineer data center connectivity. Design north-south paths for customer traffic, model distribution, storage access, and fleet management, alongside east-west fabrics for communication between servers. Evaluate high-speed Ethernet, InfiniBand, and RoCE against workload requirements, including bandwidth, latency, congestion, and failure behavior.\n\nSelect and qualify fiber services. Evaluate shared PON broadband, dedicated internet access, Ethernet private lines, wavelength services, and dark fiber where appropriate. Assess committed versus advertised bandwidth, oversubscription, symmetry, latency, jitter, packet loss, public addressing, routing options, service guarantees, repair commitments, lead times, and total cost.\n\nBuild provider relationships. Work directly with ISPs and carriers on service availability, technical requirements, provisioning, acceptance testing, and incident escalation. Verify physical path diversity and shared dependencies when designing redundant connectivity.\n\nOptimize the distributed fleet. Define when sites should connect directly to the internet, through regional aggregation, or through private interconnects. Evaluate transit, peering, cloud connectivity, traffic engineering, and failover options using measured performance and economics.\n\nPartner with orchestration engineering. Provide network topology, capacity, and health signals that support workload placement, traffic steering, and recovery. Account for model transfers, request traffic, and distributed inference communication when determining which workloads can run efficiently within or across sites.\n\nBuild security and resilience into deployments. Implement tenant isolation, separation of compute and management traffic, encrypted connectivity, access controls, and DDoS mitigation with the security team. Design remote recovery and appropriate out-of-band access for unattended sites.\n\nAutomate and operate at scale. Build repeatable provisioning, configuration validation, staged changes, rollback, and inventory management. Establish telemetry, service objectives, alerting, runbooks, and acceptance tests; lead network incident diagnosis and corrective actions.\n\nAbout You\nRequired\n8+ years of relevant network engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated expertise, including ownership of production architecture and hands-on implementation.\n\nStrong experience with both data center networks and WAN or ISP connectivity across multiple sites.\n\nDeep understanding of TCP/IP, BGP, IPv4/IPv6, routing, switching, segmentation, VPNs, firewalls, QoS, and high-availability design.\n\nPractical understanding of fiber access and carrier service models, including how to validate real performance, availability, and commercial service commitments.\n\nExperience designing and troubleshooting high-speed server networks, including NICs, optics, cabling, MTU, congestion, and oversubscription.\n\nAbility to translate application traffic patterns and service objectives into network requirements, and explain performance, resilience, and cost tradeoffs clearly.\n\nHands-on Linux troubleshooting and network automation using Python, Ansible, or comparable tools, with version-controlled configurations and disciplined change management.\n\nA record of taking ambiguous problems from design through deployment and production support, working effectively with engineering teams, vendors, and field operators.\n\nBonus\nProduction experience with GPU clusters, AI inference, HPC, InfiniBand, RoCE, RDMA, or NCCL performance analysis.\n\nExperience with EVPN/VXLAN, leaf-spine fabrics, cloud interconnects, internet peering, or operating an autonomous system.\n\nExperience operating a large fleet of unattended edge sites, including zero-touch provisioning, carrier-grade NAT constraints, and remote recovery.\n\nFamiliarity with Kubernetes networking, multi-tenant compute platforms, and network-aware workload scheduling.\n\nExperience qualifying carrier services and negotiating technical requirements across multiple providers or regions.\n\nLife at SPAN\nHeadquartered in San Francisco’s vibrant SoMa neighborhood, we are an eclectic group of creative thinkers who value open communication, teamwork, and a ‘make it happen’ approach to addressing complex challenges.\nSPAN embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.\nWe’re hiring talented individuals who are driven by success and are passionate about shaping the future of renewable energy. If that sounds like you, we’d love for you to consider joining the rapidly growing team at SPAN.\nThe Perks:\nCompetitive compensation + equity grants at a well-funded, venture-backed company\nComprehensive benefits: 100% employee premiums for base plans on medical, dental, vision with options for additional coverage. Parental leave up to twenty four (24) weeks depending on eligibility\nComfortable, sunny office space located near BART and Caltrain public transit\nStrong focus on team building and company culture: Employee Resource Groups, monthly social events, SPANcakes recognition breakfast, lunch, and learns\nFlexible hours, one holiday per month, and flexible time off\nInterested in joining our team? Apply today and we’ll be in touch with the next steps!","description_format":"text","description_chars":7123,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible time off","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Smart Home Devices","Energy Management","EV Charging"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-09T06:52:15Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-23T02:13:04Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-10-26T16:06:29Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 10 · green card filings: 5","filings_12m":10,"filings_prev_12m":9,"green_card_filings_12m":5,"median_offered_wage_usd":162500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":77,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.859,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":51,"expected_fill_days":102,"reasons":["conf:0","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":230000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/span-data-center-network-architect","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/span-data-center-network-architect.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-30T16:44:08Z","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":5000,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-31T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"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":5825},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5825"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fspan-data-center-network-architect"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"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%2Fspan-data-center-network-architect"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"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%2Fspan-data-center-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/span-data-center-network-architect\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fspan-data-center-network-architect"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":562680}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"span.io","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":562680},"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. 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