Network Architect

Runware is the AI inference platform that builds and operates its own infrastructure, end to end. One API gives developers access to image, video, audio, 3D and language models, and our Sonic Inference Engine runs them on hardware we designed ourselves: custom servers, custom boards and a closed-loop, water-free cooling system, packed into Sonic Inference Pods — roughly 1 MW of liquid-cooled GPU compute in a 20-foot container that can be sited wherever power is cheap and available.

This is why infrastructure at Runware is the product, not a cost center. Our edge is that we run inference 30–90% cheaper per GPU-hour than our peers, and that edge is earned in the data center: in how fast we can stand up a new site, how tightly we run our fleet, and how little downtime our customers ever see. More than 20 billion requests have run through the platform for over a million developers, with customers such as Wix, Quora, Freepik and Higgsfield building production applications on top of it.

We raised a $50M Series A led by Dawn Capital, with Comcast Ventures, Speedinvest, Insight Partners and a16z speedrun participating, and we are now building out a global network of pods across the US and Europe. We need someone to own how that network is operated.

The Role

As Network Architect, you'll own the design, build, and operation of the network that moves every inference request through Runware: the GPU cluster fabric inside our data centers, the backbone and edge that deliver results to customers, and the cloud and hybrid connectivity that ties partner capacity into one platform. Runware's product is latency. The network is where a large share of that latency, and of our cost per request, is decided, and today there is no single owner for it. You'll be that owner.

This is a senior, hands-on architecture role with significant authority and no direct reports to start. You'll report to Risto Haukioja, Head of AI Infrastructure. You'll set the network strategy, design and build the systems yourself, define how they are operated and capacity-planned, and lead through design authority across Infrastructure, Platform, and ML Engineering. You've run high-performance teams before, and you'll shape the standards and hiring plan for network engineering as the footprint grows. We expect you to use AI tooling as a core part of how you work, so that one architect can produce what a small team used to.

What you'll do

Own the network architecture end to end. Define the target architecture and multi-year roadmap for Runware's data center fabric, backbone and edge, and cloud and hybrid connectivity, and make the design decisions that trade off latency, throughput, cost, and resilience.

Design and build the GPU cluster fabric. Architect spine-leaf fabrics for multi-node inference and training: 400G/800G Ethernet, RoCEv2 and InfiniBand, lossless transport, congestion control, and topology choices that keep east-west traffic from becoming the bottleneck.

Deliver inference to customers fast and reliably. Own the backbone and edge: multi-region interconnect, transit and peering strategy, anycast and traffic steering, DDoS and edge security posture, and the path that gets every response to the customer with as few milliseconds as possible.

Connect cloud, bare metal, and partner capacity into one platform. Design VPC, VPN, and private interconnect across hyperscalers, bare-metal providers, and colocation sites so new capacity can be brought online quickly and operated consistently.

Build network operations, not just networks. Define how the network is monitored, changed, and repaired: telemetry and observability, change management, incident runbooks, and on-call practices that hold up at scale. Stand up what doesn't exist yet.