Network Reliability Engineer AI (f/m/d) in Karlsruhe

What can you expect?

• You own reliability of the physical fabric, SDN overlay, and virtual network functions across all our company's data centers, setting service level objectives and driving down unplanned downtime
• You lead incident response on major network incidents and run postmortems that produce lasting fixes
• You remove toil through automation, working with NRE Automation on pipelines and tooling for lifecycle, patching, and service configuration
• You apply AI to operations, including anomaly detection, automated diagnosis, config generation and validation, and automated remediation, with the judgment to know when AI output is trustworthy
• You strengthen observability so problems surface before they reach customers, and shape lifecycle, upgrade, change-management, and capacity practices
• You collaborate with NRE Provisioning on clean handovers and share the on-call rotation covering the above

What do we offer?

• Attraktive Arbeitsbedingungen: Du profitierst von einem hybriden Arbeitsmodell und flexiblen Arbeitszeiten durch Vertrauensarbeitszeit
• Moderne Arbeitsumgebung: An einigen Standorten gibt es eine subventionierte Kantine und verschiedene kostenlose Getränke, sowie moderne Büroräume mit sehr guter Verkehrsanbindung
• Vielfältige Mitarbeitervorteile: Du erhältst verschiedene Mitarbeiterrabatte für Aktivitäten und Produkte
• Gemeinschaftliche Unternehmungen: Wir organisieren Mitarbeiterevents wie Sommer- und Winterfeste sowie Workshops
• Persönliche Weiterentwicklung: Zahlreiche Schulungs- und Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten stehen dir zur Verfügung
• Gesundheitsförderung: Es gibt verschiedene Gesundheitsangebote, wie Sport- und Gesundheitskurse

What should you bring along?

• You have extensive hands-on experience operating large-scale production data center networks, with 5+ years for Senior roles and longer for Staff roles
• You possess deep Layer 2 and Layer 3 knowledge, including routing (BGP, OSPF) and VXLAN with BGP/EVPN
• You have experience with multi-vendor operations across Juniper and Cisco, and familiarity with SONiC and Netbox is a plus
• You have strong Linux fundamentals and the toolkit that goes with them, such as bash, tcpdump, iptables, and git
• You have built network automation using Python with Ansible and CI/CD on GitLab
• You have a reliability-engineering mindset, focusing on SLOs, observability, incident command, postmortems, and designing out toil
• You are fluent in the critical use of AI in daily engineering, with a track record or credible ideas for applying AI to network operations
• You are fluent in English for international teams, and German is a plus, with ownership and a calm approach when things break

NRE Operations runs the data center networks for the entire IONOS group: the physical fabric and underlay, the SDN overlay, and the virtual network functions on top, across dozens of data centers. We are looking for a senior or staff-level engineer who operates large production networks with a reliability mindset. You define what "healthy" means, catch problems before customers do, lead the hardest incidents, and partner with NRE Automation to push routine operations toward zero manual steps. AI is central to how we work, both to make the network smarter and to make each engineer faster.

We expect every engineer here to be fluent with AI, and we mean it in two concrete ways. First, applying AI to the network itself: anomaly detection, automated diagnosis and root-cause analysis, config generation and validation, smarter alerting, and runbook or agent-driven automation. Second, using AI to raise your own output: coding assistants and LLM tooling for scripting, troubleshooting, research, and documentation. Reliability work punishes blind trust, so the skill that matters most is judgment. You need to know when an AI-generated config or diagnosis is trustworthy and when it is not.