Data Center Network Architect

SPAN is enabling electrification for all ⚡ XFRA by SPAN is the first distributed data center using existing infrastructure and underutilized power capacity to meet expanding AI compute demand. Decarbonization is the process to reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, from entering our atmosphere. Electrification 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. At SPAN, we believe in: Enabling homes and vehicles powered by clean energy Making electrification upgrades possible Building more resilient homes with reliable backup Designing a flexible and distributed electrical grid The Role We are looking for a Network Architect to own the design, deployment, and operation of the network connecting XFRA’s distributed compute fleet. Your 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. This 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.

Own 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. Engineer 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. Select 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. Build 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. Optimize 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. Partner 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. Build 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. Automate 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. About You