Senior Cloud Network Engineer

About Graphcore 

How often do you get the chance to build a technology that transforms the future of humanity? 

Graphcore products have set the standard in made-for-AI compute hardware and software, gaining global attention and industry acclaim. Now we are developing the next generation of artificial intelligence compute with systems that will allow AI researchers to develop more advanced models, help scientists unlock exciting new discoveries, and power companies around the world as they put AI at the heart of their business. 

Graphcore recently joined SoftBank Group – bringing large and ongoing investment from one of the world’s leading backers of innovative AI companies. 

Job Summary  
We are looking for a Senior Network Engineer to join our Cloud Platform Team and help develop and deploy clouds and services. Working closely with our colleagues in Software Platform, Datacentre Operations and Product Development teams, you will deploy services onour fleet of cutting-edge AI systems. As part of our Software Platform organisation, you will be involved in the cloud integration, validation, performance benchmarking, optimisation, and development of our high-performance AI solutions.  These include in-house AI systems alongside off-the-shelf high-performance servers, switches and storage solutions.  This is a hand-on technical role requiring a solid background in the use of cloud infrastructure, deployment using Infrastructure-as-Code, observability, high-performance networkingand storage systems.  You may have been working in an IT organisation, a datacentre, a cloud provider or as a developer of orchestration or cloud services.   

The Software Platform team at Graphcore 

We build Graphcore products into large-scale AI solutions for our customers and the Cloud Platform Team is responsible for providing such systems to both internal users via private clouds and customers via our own public clouds.  Often the internal systems will be using and developing pre-release hardware and software, so it’s vital you are comfortable with unproven components. 

Responsibilities and Duties 
 

• Develop and operate high-performance ethernet infrastructure on our private clouds and support internal users in their use. You will turn end-user and product requirements into deployed services. 

• Help to build automation to collect and analyse metrics and other data from the network infrastructure to support clear identification and reporting of any issues.  Work with users to provide information of any product-related issues to Engineering and QA departments. 

• Work with our Datacentre Operations Engineers to maintain, tune and operate the fleet of AI systems at peak performance in our private clouds. 
• Work with external vendors of off-the-shelf switches, servers and storage solutions to integrate 3rd party products into our Cloud Reference Design, with a focus on network performance, automation and resilience. 

Skills and Experience (all required) 

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in a relevant subject. 
• Significant hands-on experience with 1 or more vendor’s high-end (100Gb/s+) ethernet switch solutions. 
• Experience managing on-premises or private-cloud environments.  
• Solid software engineering or IT experience with a proven track record of delivering technical output as an individual contributor. 
• Experience working in an AGILE and SCRUM framework, including understanding of priorities, risks, issues, impacts and constraints.  
• Strong proven Linux scripting ability (bash, python, awk, sed). 
• Strong proven Linux system administration (Ubuntu, RHEL and variants). 
• Experience with a version control system (preferably Git) and using it to manage system configuration or automation. 
• Experience with Continuous Integration or testing pipelines using GitLab, GitHub or similar. 
• A solid hands-on understanding of the technologies underpinning cloud services (APIs, virtualisation of CPUs, IO, systems) and how they relate to high-performance networking. 
• Experience with IAC automation tools (Terraform/OpenTofu, Ansible). 
• Experience with container deployment and management tools (e.g. docker). 
• Experience with solutions for monitoring and observability. e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, OpenSearch/ElasticSearch, Loki.  
• Good communication and presentation skills, and experience dealing with end-users of IT services. 
• An ability to work independently on critical infrastructure with minimal oversight, and with a focus on end-user availability.  

Desirable but not required: 

• Experience with Openstack cloud platforms. 
• Experience with High Performance Computing (HPC) environments using SLURM or similar batch workload solutions. 
• Experience with hardware offloading on RDMA-capable NICs and how that integrates with virtual networking on Open V-switch, KVM/QEMU. 
• Experience with managing production Kubernetes clusters and workloads with an automation tool such as ArgoCD. 

Benefits

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working, a generous annual leave policy, private medical insurance and health cash plan, a dental plan, pension (matched up to 5%), life assurance and income protection. We have a generous parental leave policy and an employee assistance programme (which includes health, mental wellbeing, and bereavement support). We offer a range of healthy food and snacks at our central Bristol office and have our own barista bar! We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we’re committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.

Sponsorship

Applicants for this position must hold the right to work in the UK. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship or support for visa applications.