Sr. Principal Engineer, Scale-Up (Data Path Features)

Why join Upscale, Inc. Upscale, Inc., is building the high-performance infrastructure powering the next generation of artificial intelligence. Backed by over $300M in funding and rapid global adoption, we are scaling systems designed for the world’s most demanding AI workloads. We focus on first-principles engineering across silicon, systems, and networking—where performance, scale, and execution are critical. Our team is talent-dense and high-performing.

We value ownership, technical rigor, and speed, and we offer the opportunity to work on foundational problems with immediate, real-world impact. If you’re looking to do high-impact work, move fast, and help define the infrastructure behind the future of AI—Upscale is where you can produce meaningful work at the frontier—and operate at a high standard. Position Overview Senior individual-contributor validation role. You own how data-path features are qualified on our scale-up AI networking platform, from the SAI/SDK programming path through ASIC forwarding and traffic-management behavior.

You set the test strategy, own feature readiness and release sign-off, debug the hardest cross-stack failures, and grow the QA engineers around you. Primary depth is traffic management. Feature scope (cycle-accurate model and silicon) Key Responsibilities Classification and marking: DSCP and 802.1p to traffic class, trust, TC-to-queue, remarking, port versus switch map binding, classification miss, ACL rewrite Queueing: unicast and multicast queues, counters, occupancy, watermarks, drops Scheduling: strict priority, WRR/DWRR, hierarchy, shaping, rate limiting, fairness under oversubscription Buffering: ingress and egress pools, static and dynamic thresholds, priority groups, headroom, reserved versus shared PFC and lossless Ethernet: pause, headroom, lossless queues, watchdog, storm and deadlock, DCB ECN and WRED: thresholds, drop probability, ECT/CE, interaction with DCQCN under RoCEv2 Policing: color-blind and color-aware, CIR/PIR/CBS/PBS, trTCM Forwarding and counters: L2/L3, ECMP, mirror and sample, telemetry that makes the above observable Own the validation strategy, test plans, coverage, and release entry/exit criteria for the features above Qualify lossless and congestion behavior under RoCEv2 and GPU collectives (NCCL/RCCL) at line rate, including incast, PFC headroom, ECN accuracy, and no-drop Build the frameworks and debug tools the team depends on, including model-based checks of classification, queueing, scheduling, and drop or mark outcomes Lead root-cause analysis across software, SDK, model, silicon, and Linux, and decide when the spec, the implementation, or the test is wrong Mentor QA engineers, review their plans and automation, and represent validation in design reviews and the development-to-QA handoff Support customer deployments, proofs of concept, and field issues on data-path and congestion behavior Requirements 15+ years in networking software, system validation, or ASIC/platform QA, with a substantial stretch as a senior individual contributor Deep hands-on traffic management: PFC, scheduling, buffers, classification and marking, queueing, ECN/WRED Strong L2/L3 and ACL fundamentals, and experience with SAI, a switch SDK, or a NOS such as SONiC or FBOSS Ownership of validation frameworks and automation, not only test execution Python or Go at framework-review level; solid Linux and packet- and counter-level debugging Proven mentoring and influence as an individual contributor, and clear written readiness and root-cause reports Preferred Ethernet ASIC QA in L2/L3, buffers, scheduling, and queueing RoCEv2, RDMA, DCB, PFC tuning, and DCQCN on AI or HPC fabrics; NCCL/RCCL on NVIDIA or AMD GPU clusters ASIC bring-up, C-model or emulation, and pre-silicon to post-silicon correlation Buffer and headroom sizing; incast, microburst, and oversubscription debug Ixia, Keysight, Spirent, or similar line-rate tools NVLink or ESUN; customer, field, or forward-deployed work is a plus Where you fall within that range depends on your experience, skills, and impact—we benchmark against internal levels to keep things fair and consistent.

Equal Opportunity Upscale, Inc., is building a team that reflects a wide range of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. We’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and consider all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or veteran status. Accessibility & Accommodations We’re committed to making our hiring process accessible to everyone.

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