Senior Systems Engineer

About Share

Share is a venture-backed internet infrastructure network building Africa’s backbone. The company aggregates underutilized telecom infrastructure, fiber, subsea cables, and data centers, and provides ISPs with scalable access to bandwidth without traditional upfront costs. Share’s network spans thousands of kilometers of fiber, 12 infrastructure providers, and 10 data centers, reaching over 8 million people across East Africa.

At the network level, Share operates a RADIUS proxy architecture that authenticates ISP subscribers, provisions their internet access, and coordinates with partner BNG (Broadband Network Gateway) equipment. The platform must coexist with existing ISP infrastructure, not replace it. This means every deployment involves real BNG configuration, real RADIUS authentication, and real subscriber traffic.

This role sits at the intersection of network engineering and systems engineering. You will own the infrastructure that makes internet access work for Share’s partner ISPs.

We are hiring a Systems Engineer to own Share’s network-facing infrastructure: the Free RADIUS proxy servers that authenticate ISP subscribers, the provisioning pipeline that pushes credentials and plan attributes to per-partner RADIUS servers, the BNG integration layer, and the deployment and monitoring of all systems infrastructure. You will work directly with the network team (who handle ISP-side BNG configuration) and the software team (who build the APIs that drive provisioning).

This is a hands‑on role. You will configure Free RADIUS servers, write deployment scripts, troubleshoot authentication failures on production networks, and design the infrastructure that scales from 5 ISP partners to 50. You will be the person the team calls when a subscriber can’t authenticate or when a new ISP’s BNG doesn’t behave as expected.

• Free RADIUS proxy architecture: Share operates a central RADIUS proxy that routes authentication requests to per‑partner Free RADIUS servers. The proxy uses a failover mechanism (soft reject → attribute clearing → failover to partner pool) to determine whether a subscriber is Share‑managed or partner‑managed. You will own the configuration, deployment, monitoring, and scaling of this architecture.

• Per‑partner Free RADIUS servers: Each ISP partner gets a dedicated Free RADIUS instance with a Hono API overlay for programmatic CRUD of subscriber credentials and plan attributes. You will manage these instances, their database backends, and their API endpoints.

• BNG integration support: Work with the network team to define and validate the BNG‑side configuration changes required for each ISP partner (RADIUS pointer, Share‑specific subnet, source‑based routing, pool configuration). You are the bridge between the software platform and the ISP’s physical infrastructure.

• Provisioning pipeline: The software platform’s Provisioning service pushes subscriber credentials and plan attributes to Free RADIUS. You own the receiving end — ensuring the Free RADIUS API, database, and RADIUS configuration are correct and performant.

• Infrastructure and deployment: Server provisioning, deployment automation, monitoring, logging, and security for all systems infrastructure. Git Hub Actions pipelines, SSH‑based deployments, VM management.

• CoA (Change of Authorization): Design and implement the CoA endpoint on per‑partner Free RADIUS servers for real‑time plan changes and session disconnects without re‑authentication.

RADIUS and network authentication

• Free RADIUS (v3 in production, v4 evaluation in progress) — proxy configuration, virtual servers, module configuration (sql, rest, files)

• RADIUS protocols:
  Access‑Request/Accept/Reject, Accounting (Start‑Interim‑Stop), CoA (Disconnect‑Request, CoA‑Request)

• PPPoE authentication flow: subscriber CPE → BNG → RADIUS proxy → per‑partner RADIUS → response with speed/pool/timeout attributes

• Mikro Tik Router
  
  OS BNG configuration (the network team handles this, but you need to understand the RADIUS‑facing side)

• Per‑user flat attributes (speed, IP pool, session timeout) pushed via Hono API to Free RADIUS SQL backend

Systems and infrastructure

• Li…