About the Role:
You will own the IP and optical architecture for CrowdStrike's global backbone, including connectivity to traditional and neocloud providers. You'll set the multi-year roadmap governing its evolution, including traffic engineering strategy, capacity planning, and demand forecasting for the network as a whole. You'll drive the initiatives that matter most to the business, from funding case through implementation and long-term operational stewardship, and act as the senior escalation resource in the 24x7 on-call rotation when an incident exceeds the depth of the engineers already on it.
What You'll Do:
You'll own platform selection for routing and optical hardware, working directly with vendor engineering teams to influence their roadmaps, and engage director- and VP-level stakeholders across datacenter, application, and business teams to keep network strategy ahead of the company's growth. You'll set the direction for network automation and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD, GitOps), and for telemetry and analytics strategy, increasingly including frontier and open-weight AI models for tasks like telemetry analysis and automated triage, with sensitive backbone data kept in-house. Part of the role is raising the technical bar of the organization: reviewing senior engineers' designs, setting the standards they build against, and mentoring them toward this level.
What You'll Need:
- US Citizenship or Green Card holder status
- 12+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale backbone networks, with ownership of architecture at global scale
- Deep expertise in IP/MPLS core technologies: IS-IS, MP-BGP, segment
- routing (SR-MPLS/SRv6), PE/P architectures, MPLS-TE, VRFs, DDoS mitigation, CDN
- Deep expertise in optical transport: DWDM, coherent optics (400G/800G), ROADM architectures, amplifier design (EDFA/Raman), dispersion management, alien wavelengths
- Strong grounding in cloud networking: direct connectivity, multi-cloud routing, and hybrid cloud at scale across major hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, OCI, Azure) and neoclouds (e.g., CoreWeave, Cerebras)
- Working depth in adjacent infrastructure domains (virtualization, containers, databases, message queuing, large-scale provisioning) sufficient to architect across boundaries
- Proven ability to set, not just execute, network automation and IaC strategy
- Familiarity with applying frontier and open-weight AI models to network operations (e.g., telemetry analysis, automated triage, ChatOps tooling), including self-hosting open-weight models where data sensitivity requires it
- Experience operating or architecting networks within FedRAMP-authorized environments
- Track record of selecting, testing, and deploying networking hardware and software organization-wide, across major vendors (Juniper, Infinera, Nokia, Arista, Cisco, etc.)
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Proven experience utilizing AI technologies to enhance decision-making, streamline workflows and processes, improve efficiency and drive business outcomes.
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Benefits of Working at CrowdStrike:
Market leader in compensation and equity awards
Comprehensive physical and mental wellness programs
Competitive vacation and holidays for recharge
Paid parental and adoption leaves
Professional development opportunities for all employees regardless of level or role
Employee Networks, geographic neighborhood groups, and volunteer opportunities to build connections
Vibrant office culture with world class amenities
Great Place to Work Certified14 across the globe
