Network Platform Team Lead

About Volta

Volta is the category-defining, fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform – from capital to clusters to software, under a founder-led enterprise. Our mission is The Utility of Compute™: AI infrastructure as dependable and available as electricity, for every organization that needs it. Launched with a $10B strategic partnership with one of the leading frontier AI labs, a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $5B AI Infrastructure Fund, Volta is building the infrastructure layer of the AI era from the ground up.

We are 100+ people across London, Palo Alto, and New York, with rapid growth expectations to hundreds.

Volta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for AI workloads. The network is not a layer underneath the platform, it is part of it. Fabric design, overlay and multi-tenancy, edge connectivity, and the software that programs and observes all of it sit in one team, deliberately.

You will lead that team: a small group of senior network platform engineers who write production software against the fabric rather than only operating it.

• Lead the network platform engineering team: technical direction, design reviews, code review, and day-to-day delivery.

• Set the technical direction for the network layers of the platform: compute and storage fabric, overlay and multi-tenant isolation, edge connectivity, and the telemetry and automation that make them operable.

• Own the design and evolution of Volta's fabric standards across sites, including RoCE v2 and Infini Band deployments, and hold the team to a single reference architecture rather than per site variants.

• Represent network platform engineering in roadmap planning: translate product requirements into scoped, sequenced technical work, communicate trade-offs, and keep delivery on track.

• Own how network capability is exposed upward: the APIs, abstractions, and IaaS control plane integration through which tenants get isolated, performant networking.

• Work closely with the bring-up teams to surface operational pain points from cluster deployment and turn them into scalable platform features and automation.

• Evaluate and challenge network designs from OEMs and partners, and hold vendors to Volta's requirements rather than accepting reference designs as given.

• Support customer facing technical conversations: workload requirements, fabric design review, and acceptance criteria.

• Collaborate with the security engineering team on trust boundaries, tenant isolation, and remediation of network layer findings.

• Coordinate with the other platform engineering leads on shared architecture, joint initiatives, and cross-team and cross-timezone delivery.

• Own reliability, observability, and interface and versioning standards for the services and fabric your team ships.

• Stay hands-on: take on complex or high-risk engineering work directly alongside the team, including during bring-up and incident response.

• Run post-mortems and close structural gaps after incidents, not just the immediate issue.

• Manage the team: 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring interviews, and onboarding.

• 5+ years in large scale data center or cloud network engineering, with at least 2 years leading an engineering team.

• Production software development, not scripting. Python or Go in a shared repository under normal review and CI standards. Our working languages are Python, Go, and Rust.

• Ethernet fabric design and operations at depth: leaf spine, BGP including unnumbered BGP, ECMP, and the day-two realities of running it at low latency.

• RoCE v2 at scale: PFC and ECN tuning, DCQCN, and a clear understanding of how it behaves differently from Infini Band in a GPU training environment.

• Infini Band production experience: fat tree topology, UFM, fabric partitioning, adaptive routing, congestion control, with operational and troubleshooting depth rather than design familiarity alone.

• EVPN and VXLAN in production, including running an overlay under multi-tenant load.

• Network automation at scale: configuration as code, a source of truth system such as Net Box or Nautobot, CI validation of network change, and declarative or idempotent tooling.

• Kubernetes networking: CNI, and how workload networking interacts with the underlying fabric.

• GPU infrastructure experience: how training and inference traffic patterns shape fabric design, and how capacity is surfaced through a platform or API layer.

• Multi-vendor credibility: able to design, evaluate, and challenge proposals from any major OEM.

• Security awareness: trust boundaries, least privilege, and secure defaults in multi-tenant network design.

• Proven people management: running 1:1s, delivering performance feedback, and taking accountability for a team's delivery and wellbeing.

• Clear communicator who can translate technical complexity for product, leadership, and customer stakeholders.

• Willing to be on site during cluster bring-up when it matters.

None of these are…