Network & Infrastructure Engineer

About THUMBWAR

THUMBWAR is a technical solutions company that combines the talents of our diverse staff, our inventory of equipment, and the experience of over fifteen years in business to produce unique solutions to solve our clients needs.

We work with broadcast networks to design and execute live broadcast workflows, with an emphasis on remote work and hybrid workflows.

We work with content providers to enable workflows that leverage content aggregation to create engaging programming for platforms such as web and mobile during marquee events.

We work with large companies and institutions where we have integrated large-scale storage and archive environments and remain trusted partners after the initial installation for on-going support and maintenance. We do this by providing consulting, on-going support, and turnkey IT infrastructure design and deployment.

Our team, our clients, and our projects may be diverse, but at the core is a cohesive understanding of our customers’ needs and how THUMBWAR’s unique perspective and skillset can address them.

About the Role

This is not a corporate help-desk or a static office-networking role. At THUMBWAR, our hybrid infrastructure kit is our product. We operate in the high-stakes, zero-downtime world of live sports broadcasting and premium media production, where our customers rely upon us to deliver critical broadcast workflows for air.

We are seeking a hands-on, highly adaptable Network & Infrastructure Engineer to join our growing engineering team. This role bridges the gap between heavy-duty routing, enterprise virtualization, and physical hardware across our production facilities and remote broadcast operations.

If you are bored of clicking through cloud consoles, want to build tangible, high-performance infrastructure, and thrive in an environment where your engineering decisions directly impact live broadcasts, this is your next step.

The base salary for this role is $80,000 - $110,000 / year. Final compensation will be determined by factors such as the candidate’s experience and skills.

Key Responsibilities

• Deploy Live Networks: Design, provision, and maintain complex Layer 2 and Layer 3 media network infrastructures across our remote broadcast footprints.
• Manage Virtualization Ecosystems: Own the deployment, configuration, and performance tuning of our hypervisor platforms, with a primary focus on scaling and monitoring Proxmox environments.
• Physical Hardware Ownership: Rack, cable, stack, and troubleshoot physical server hardware, enterprise switches, and high-performance storage arrays. You own the infrastructure from the bare metal up.
• Architect Segmented Routing: Implement and maintain robust routing architectures utilizing OSPF, BGP, and Multi-VRF segmentation to ensure secure, low-latency media transport and route leaking where required.
• Ensure Zero-Failure Event Support: Support live event schedules, proactively monitoring network health and swiftly diagnosing real-time infrastructure or hypervisor bottlenecks under tight production deadlines.
• Infrastructure as a Code: Real hardware monitoring and reliability meets DevOps. We are deploying an innovative hybrid kit and will rely upon the latest in deployment methodologies like Ansible and Terraform to ensure we continue to innovate while maintaining high levels of service.

The Ideal Candidate

• You Are a Hands-On Builder: You genuinely enjoy the physical aspect of engineering - racking a 2U server neatly, running clean fiber patches, and working on live production events.
• You Own the Outcome: You don’t just identify a problem and pass the ticket along. You diagnose the root cause, fix the issue, and document the solution so it never happens again.
• You Dare to Suggest Better: You challenge traditional “this is how we’ve always done it” thinking. If there’s an open-source tool, an automation script, or an architecture tweak that saves time or money, you build the business case, you design with the team,and build it.
• You True-Up Your Skills: You don’t hide behind acronyms on a resume. You are confident enough in your engineering fundamentals to sit down at a terminal and prove your knowledge in a practical environment. Automation and use of AI will be critical in delivery of our services and you will embrace this learning.

Required Technical Qualifications

• Network Fundamentals: CCNA-level routing and switching knowledge. Cisco Certified Network Associate certification is strongly preferred, but equivalent verified experience is welcome.
• Core Routing/Switching: Deep understanding of Layer 2/Layer 3 technologies, TCP/IP design (RFC 1918), and hands-on experience with interior/exterior gateway protocols (OSPF and BGP).
• Advanced Networking: Solid understanding of Multi-VRF design, route leaking, Linux networking (bridges, bonds), and OpenVSwitch.
• Virtualization Mastery: Hands-on experience managing hypervisors, with a strong focus on Proxmox or enterprise VMware environments, including hypervisor-to-network integration (e.g., mapping VLANs and trunk ports to virtualization nodes).
• Security Connectivity: Practical experience deploying secure VPN tunnels using tools like WireGuard or Tailscale.
• Automation and Scripting. Practical experience with scripting workflows (Bash, Python, NodeJs, etc.) to automate repetitive infrastructure tasks. Use of AI to solve problems and orchestrate outcomes.
• Schedule & Physical Demands: Flexibility to work a non-traditional schedule that aligns with live sports and entertainment broadcasts - including evenings, weekends, and event-driven timelines. Physical ability to lift, rack, and install server and network equipment.

Preferred Technical Qualifications

• Storage & Media Workflows: Familiarity with ZFS, file-sharing protocols (SMB, NFS), and advanced storage networking (RDMA, RoCE, iSCSI, cluster file systems).
• Overlay Networks: Experience configuring or troubleshooting VXLAN environments.
• Containers and Cloud: Familiarity with Docker and cloud environments (for instance AWS).
• Industry Context: Prior experience working within broadcast television, live production environments, or post-production facilities.

Our Interview Process: Come Ready to Build

We do things differently. After an initial conversation to align on cultural fit and career goals, your technical evaluation will be entirely hands-on.

We don’t do trick trivia questions. Instead, we design a practical assessment based exactly on what you tell us you know. If you say you excel at ZFS, we’ll hand you a system with a degraded pool to diagnose. If you tell us you’re a Layer 3 expert, we’ll give you two misconfigured switches and ask you to establish adjacency. We want to see how you think, how you troubleshoot, and how you engineer.

Ready to step out of the sidelines and into the action? Let’s talk.