What are the responsibilities and job description for the Principal Network Systems Architect position at Poolside Infrastructure Company?
About PIC
At PIC we're not just building data centers; we're reimagining how AI infrastructure gets developed, financed, and scaled by combining hyperscale-grade facilities with direct access to energy, land, and fiber at a scope that simply doesn't exist anywhere else. Backed by a best-in-class supply chain, world-class partners, and advanced partnerships with major hyperscale customers, PIC is poised to become a multi-billion dollar platform with ambitions to layer cloud, compute, and advanced manufacturing on top of our energy foundation.
If you want to work at the intersection of AI, energy, and infrastructure at a scale that will shape the next decade of compute, join our team.
About The Role
We are seeking a Principal Network Systems Architect – Orchestration & Observability to design and build an AI-native network orchestration and observability platform supporting a hyperscale AI data center campus serving multiple leading hyperscale tenants. This role will define and implement the platform responsible for network orchestration, telemetry, troubleshooting, and observability across backbone, campus, and OT environments.
This is a Greenfield opportunity in a startup environment, where you will build an AI-native platform from the ground up. You will work closely with network architects, infrastructure teams, and operations to create a highly scalable, API-driven, and intelligent network platform. This role requires a hands-on technical leader who can architect and build systems that scale with the infrastructure.
What You’ll Do
At PIC we're not just building data centers; we're reimagining how AI infrastructure gets developed, financed, and scaled by combining hyperscale-grade facilities with direct access to energy, land, and fiber at a scope that simply doesn't exist anywhere else. Backed by a best-in-class supply chain, world-class partners, and advanced partnerships with major hyperscale customers, PIC is poised to become a multi-billion dollar platform with ambitions to layer cloud, compute, and advanced manufacturing on top of our energy foundation.
If you want to work at the intersection of AI, energy, and infrastructure at a scale that will shape the next decade of compute, join our team.
About The Role
We are seeking a Principal Network Systems Architect – Orchestration & Observability to design and build an AI-native network orchestration and observability platform supporting a hyperscale AI data center campus serving multiple leading hyperscale tenants. This role will define and implement the platform responsible for network orchestration, telemetry, troubleshooting, and observability across backbone, campus, and OT environments.
This is a Greenfield opportunity in a startup environment, where you will build an AI-native platform from the ground up. You will work closely with network architects, infrastructure teams, and operations to create a highly scalable, API-driven, and intelligent network platform. This role requires a hands-on technical leader who can architect and build systems that scale with the infrastructure.
What You’ll Do
- Define and own the architecture for an AI-native network orchestration and observability platform.
- Design and build a network platform for provisioning, configuration management, and lifecycle operations.
- Develop API-driven and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) models for network deployment and control.
- Build and integrate cloud-native observability systems for telemetry, monitoring, and performance analysis.
- Design systems for troubleshooting, event correlation, alerting, and root cause analysis across network domains.
- Partner with network architects to translate logical and physical designs into platform-driven workflows.
- Establish standards for data models, system integration, and platform scalability.
- Build platforms supporting multi-domain networking (backbone, campus, OT) with unified control and visibility.
- Support and evolve the platform through day-2 operations, troubleshooting, and production incidents.
- Serve as the technical authority for platform architecture and engineering decisions.
- 15 years of experience in network engineering, software engineering, or platform engineering.
- Proven experience building network orchestration or infrastructure platforms at scale.
- Strong hands-on programming experience (Python, Go, APIs, infrastructure-as-code).
- Experience designing and building cloud-native platforms using Kubernetes and microservices architectures.
- Experience with observability stacks including Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and telemetry pipelines.
- Experience working with time-series data and large-scale telemetry systems (e.g., TSDBs, Parquet-based pipelines).
- Strong understanding of networking fundamentals and how to model and automate them in software.
- Experience building systems for troubleshooting, monitoring, and operational visibility at scale.
- Proven ability to operate as a hands-on individual contributor, delivering architecture, implementation, and operational support.
- Experience working in hyperscale, cloud, or large-scale infrastructure environments.
- Familiarity with AI-native or agent-based systems (agentic AI) applied to operations or automation.
- Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka).
- Experience integrating with DCIM or infrastructure management systems.
- Experience with multi-vendor network abstraction and control layers.
- Occasional travel to the data center campus and partner locations.
- Comfortable operating in a hands-on, fast-paced startup environment, taking ownership across design, build, and early operations, and working closely with a small, high-impact team.
- Interview w/Molly Anderson, Senior Manager of People Operations
- Interview w/Senthil Ganesan, Director of Network & Platform Infrastructure
- Interview w/our Infrastructure Team.
- Interview w/ Pierre-Yves, CTO