Senior Network Engineer

About StackYak StackYak is building the infrastructure layer for AI. We are an early-stage, funded company building software that brings compute, GPU infrastructure, networking, and inference together into one product. The opportunity is large, the market is moving quickly, and we are building for real production workloads from the start. This is not internal IT. This is not a slow-moving infrastructure team maintaining someone else's platform. The infrastructure is the product . We are a small, senior team with very little bureaucracy. This is a founding role in its discipline. There is no network team to join and no inherited design to defend — the architecture, the automation, and the operational model are yours to set. Treat this document as a starting point rather than a boundary. The people who do well here take ground early and are not asked to give it back. We move quickly. We do not have months for someone to learn the fundamentals of their discipline. You should already be very good at what you do, be able to ramp into adjacent areas quickly, and be comfortable operating without perfect requirements or neatly defined boundaries. The Role We need someone who understands networks from Linux host to data-center fabric to carrier connectivity to cloud , and can automate the whole path. A customer's traffic has to reach a GPU workload, securely and reliably, over a path that no single party controls: their edge, a carrier, our side, a provider's side. Any hop on it can be the reason something is slow, unreachable, or leaking, and the answer is rarely in the place the symptom appeared. Making one such path work is a good week for a competent network engineer. That is not this job. This job is the second path, and the fiftieth — how much of it can be made to provision itself, which parts genuinely have to stay bespoke, and how little a customer should have to do to get connectivity they would call enterprise-grade. Those questions are open here, and whoever takes the role is the one who closes them. That is why networking is part of the product rather than a support function beneath it. This is not a traditional network-operations role. We do not need someone who waits for a change ticket to configure a switch. We need a network engineer who codes, debugs systems end to end, participates in architecture, and owns production outcomes. What You Will Own Not tasks. Outcomes, and the authority that comes with them. The whole path from a customer to their workload. Customer edge, carrier, our fabric, the overlay, the host — and the requirement that the next customer's path cost a fraction of the effort of the first. Routing and segmentation. BGP, VLANs, VRFs, firewalling, and policy, including what all of it does during a failure rather than on a diagram. Tenant isolation , and the ability to define "isolated" precisely enough that it can go in a contract. Secure private access. WireGuard, IPsec, and overlays — where…