Director of Network Infrastructure and Capacity

ABOUT POOLSIDE

In this decade, the world will create Artificial General Intelligence. There will only be a small number of companies who will achieve this. Their ability to stack advantages and pull ahead will define the winners. These companies will move faster than anyone else. They will attract the world's most capable talent. They will be on the forefront of applied research, engineering, infrastructure and deployment at scale. They will continue to scale their training to larger & more capable models. They will be given the right to raise large amounts of capital along their journey to enable this. They will create powerful economic engines. They will obsess over the success of their users and customers.

poolside exists to be this company - to build a world where AI will be the engine behind economically valuable work and scientific progress.

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ABOUT THE ROLE

The Director of Network Infrastructure and Capacity will lead the engineering, planning, deployment, and optimization of network systems to support AI-centric datacenter operations. This role requires a forward-looking vision, deep technical expertise, and strong leadership to ensure ultra-low latency, high-bandwidth, and scalable network performance across large-scale AI clusters. The ideal candidate will drive innovation in AI networking fabrics, interconnects, and capacity planning to meet the exponential demands of machine learning and generative AI workloads.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• AI Workload-Ready Design

  • Architect high-throughput, low-latency networking fabrics (e.g., InfiniBand, RoCE, NVLink over Ethernet) to support distributed AI training and inference at scale.

  • Develop strategies for network scalability to handle massive east-west traffic, model checkpointing, and inter-GPU communication.

• Capacity Planning & Optimization

  • Forecast and plan for exponential growth in compute and storage traffic.

  • Design capacity models that balance throughput, resiliency, and energy efficiency.

• Inference Ingress Bandwidth Management

  • Engineer external connectivity strategies to support large-scale inference services with high ingress bandwidth demands.

  • Optimize north-south traffic flows to handle millions of concurrent API calls, streaming requests, and customer-facing inference workloads.

  • Deploy and manage multi-terabit ingress points, global load balancing, and edge integration to minimize latency for user-facing applications.

  • Collaborate with service teams to ensure predictable ingress performance for real-time AI/ML products, including LLMs, multimodal inference, and recommendation systems.

• Deployment & Operations

  • Oversee structured cabling, spine-leaf architectures, optical networking, and high-density interconnects optimized for AI clusters.

  • Ensure uptime, low jitter, and predictable latency across multi-terabit fabrics.

  • Collaborate with datacenter operations on cooling, power, and space requirements tied to network growth.

• Advanced Network Engineering

  • Integrate software-defined networking (SDN) and network automation for rapid scaling and operational efficiency.

  • Implement telemetry, real-time observability, and AI-driven monitoring tools to optimize traffic flows.

  • Stay ahead of new standards in AI networking (e.g., Ethernet AI Consortium, OpenAI fabric blueprints, NVIDIA/AMD interconnects).

• Security & Compliance

  • Ensure robust segmentation, encryption, and compliance for sensitive AI workloads.

  • Partner with cybersecurity to build zero-trust architectures for AI clusters.

• Leadership & Vendor Engagement

  • Lead and grow a high-performing team of network engineers.

  • Manage strategic vendor relationships for next-gen switches, optics, and interconnect technologies.

  • Represent the organization in industry groups and forums shaping the future of AI datacenter networking.

SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

• Education: Bac