Network Engineer

As a Network Engineer at Nascent, you own the network infrastructure that connects trading systems to exchanges, colocations, and internal platforms. You'll design low-latency network topologies, manage colocation cross-connects and exchange connectivity, maintain precision time synchronization, and keep firewall and routing policy tight. Working alongside systems engineers, SREs, and quant infrastructure teams, you'll have direct ownership over architecture decisions, vendor relationships, and the tooling you build to monitor and automate the stack. This is a hands-on role where you design connectivity from scratch rather than maintaining what someone else built.

What you'll do

• Own colocation connectivity: cross-connects, exchange feeds, and carrier relationships across production colo facilities.
• Design and maintain low-latency L2/L3 network topologies for trading infrastructure.
• Configure, troubleshoot, and optimize BGP and OSPF routing in production.
• Maintain precision time synchronization (PTP / IEEE 1588) across trading and infrastructure systems.
• Manage firewall policy (Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, or equivalent) with changes that directly affect production traffic paths.
• Write Python tooling for network automation, configuration management, and operational monitoring.
• Perform packet capture and protocol-level troubleshooting using tcpdump and Wireshark.
• Build and maintain runbooks, network diagrams, and infrastructure documentation.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and own incidents end to end, from triage through post-mortem.

What you bring

• 3+ years of hands-on experience with L2/L3 networking in latency-sensitive, colocation, or trading environments.
• Strong working knowledge of BGP and OSPF: configuration, troubleshooting, and design in production.
• Production experience with PTP (IEEE 1588) or comparable precision time synchronization.
• Proficiency in Python for network automation, configuration management, or operational tooling.
• Hands-on firewall configuration and management (Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, or equivalent).
• Packet capture and protocol-level troubleshooting skills (tcpdump, Wireshark).
• Experience designing infrastructure from scratch rather than only operating what someone else built.
• Comfort as one of two network engineers: small team, real ownership, nowhere to hide.
• End-to-end incident ownership: you dig in until resolved, not escalate and wait.
• Ability to translate network decisions into language systems engineers, SREs, and quant teams can act on.

Nice to have

• CCNP/CCIE with practical work behind it.
• Infrastructure as Code for network config (Ansible, Terraform).
• Hybrid-cloud connectivity experience (AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute).
• DPDK or kernel-bypass exposure.

What we offer

• Remote-first, distributed team with frequent in-person sprints and retreats.
• Competitive total compensation with strong bonus upside tied to performance.
• Hardware and home-office stipend, conference and learning budgets.
• Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision) and life insurance.
• Open vacation policy with flexible work hours and location.
• 16 weeks fully-paid parental leave plus supported return to work.
• Retirement matching.

About Nascent

Founded in 2020, Nascent combines venture and market pedigree with product-grade engineering to build, expand, and capture opportunity in open markets and permissionless technologies. The team focuses on models, low-latency infrastructure, and resilient systems that compound performance over time, backed by permanent capital and active across liquid and long-term strategies in the open financial system.