Network Engineer

Ahrefs is seeking an experienced Network Engineer to join our team and help manage our large-scale distributed infrastructure. In this role, you will be responsible for the design, implementation, and maintenance of our network infrastructure, ensuring high availability, performance, observability, and security.

Our system is a big part of custom OCaml code and also employs third-party technologies - Debian, ELK, Puppet, Ansible and anything else that will solve the task at hand. In this role, be prepared to deal with 100+ petabytes storage cluster, 3,000+ bare-metal servers, experimental large-scale deployments and all kinds of software bugs and hardware deviations on a daily basis.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, document, and maintain a robust and scalable network infrastructure to support Ahrefs' distributed crawler and web services
• Configure and manage network devices such as routers, switches, load balancers, as well as Linux servers
• Improve and monitor network observability and performance, troubleshoot issues related to network connectivity, latency, and throughput for network devices and servers
• Implement network security measures, including firewalls, VPNs, and access control lists
• Collaborate closely with the infrastructure team to ensure seamless integration between network and server infrastructure
• Participate in the on-call rotation to provide 24/7 support and incident response
• Automate network management tasks and develop scripts to improve efficiency

Requirements

• Deep understanding of network protocols on different levels (TCP/IP , BGP , OSPF , etc.) and network architectures
• Extensive experience with network devices and network operating systems from major vendors (e.g., Cisco, Juniper, NVIDIA)
• Strong knowledge of network security principles and best practices
• Proficiency in network automation tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Python, Bash scripting)
• Experience with virtualization technologies (e.g., VLANs, VXLANs, GRE tunnels)
• Familiarity with cloud networking concepts and services (e.g., AWS VPC, Azure Virtual Network)
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
• Excellent communication and documentation skills
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with bare-metal servers and large-scale distributed systems
• Knowledge of Linux operating system internals and kernel-level networking
• Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools (e.g., ELK stack, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Experience with OCaml or other functional programming languages is a bonus

Who We Are

Ahrefs runs an internet-scale bot that crawls the whole web 24/7, storing huge volumes of information to be indexed and structured in a timely fashion. Our backend system is powered by a custom petabyte-scale distributed key-value storage to accommodate all that data coming in at high speed. With this data, Ahrefs builds analytics services for end-users in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) space and a web-scale search platform.

We are a lean and robust team who strongly believe that better technology leads to better solutions for real-world problems.

Our motto is "first do it, then do it right, then do it better".