Manager, Infrastructure & Networking at Aarki

<h2>Who Are We?</h2> <p>RZR is an AI-native advertising platform built for the next era of performance marketing. We operate at the intersection of machine learning, programmatic media, and full-funnel mobile growth, powering campaigns for some of the world's most ambitious advertisers. Our platform is purpose-built to deliver outcomes at scale, not just impressions.</p> <p>We are a team of builders, operators, and technologists who believe the advertising industry is overdue for a fundamental rethink. We move fast, operate with a high degree of ownership, and hold ourselves to an exceptionally high standard of craft.</p> <p>RZR is scaling aggressively with an active M&amp;A pipeline and a platform vision that puts us on a path to becoming an industry leader. This is a rare opportunity to join a company at an inflection point and help shape what it becomes.</p> <h2>Role Overview</h2> <p>RZR runs its own metal — four owned-and-operated data centers across Santa Clara, Ashburn, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong, housing approximately 1,300 servers and 1.15MW of capacity, placed next to the major ad exchanges, serving 5–6M+ bid requests per second at ~20ms. This infrastructure is our competitive moat, not a cost center.</p> <p>As Manager, Infrastructure, you will own day-to-day and quarter-to-quarter operation of that entire footprint: the team, hardware lifecycle, capacity planning, incident response, and vendor relationships. You will take over these functions directly from the Head of Cybersecurity &amp; Infrastructure, freeing him to focus on security and multi-entity IT.</p> <p>This is a hands-on manager role. There is no "scale up" button here — latency, packets-per-second, and procurement lead times are the job. The right person combines deep bare-metal operational instincts with the leadership presence to run a distributed, experienced global team from day one.</p> <h2>Key Responsibilities</h2> <h3>Team Leadership &amp; Operations</h3> <ul> <li>Manage and develop the InfraOps team across US and APAC time zones, including regional DC owners (SV/VA and NL/HK) and network engineering</li> <li>Own the weekly DevOps check-in cadence, alert reviews, and 24/7 on-call coverage model</li> <li>Drive P1/P2 incident response end to end — accountability for MTTR reduction, runbook coverage, and alert hygiene</li> </ul> <h3>Capacity Planning &amp; Hardware Lifecycle</h3> <ul> <li>Own capacity planning and hardware lifecycle across all four data centers: Dell and Supermicro procurement through VARs, GPU expansion for on-prem ML training and inference, colo power and space management, and remote-hands logistics with Equinix and Digital Realty</li> <li>Run the annual cloud-vs-colo evaluation alongside leadership, with full ownership of the recommendation</li> </ul> <h3>Technical Platform Oversight</h3> <ul> <li>Oversee the core infrastructure stack: Ubuntu/systemd fleet, FreeIPA, Ansible/Salt configuration management, MAAS provisioning, and Zabbix monitoring</li> <li>Manage the spine-leaf Mellanox/NVIDIA network via Netris, including 100G Google peering and transit blend (Lumen/Cogent/Zayo)</li> <li>Support the stateful data tier — Aerospike, Kafka, ClickHouse, Hadoop/HDFS — across capacity limits, evictions, migrations, and low-latency tuning</li> </ul> <h3>Vendor &amp; Budget Management</h3> <ul> <li>Own colo and vendor relationships and budgets: Equinix and Digital Realty invoices, transit contracts, VAR procurement, and Netris licensing</li> <li>Partner with the security/compliance function on SOC 2 Type 2 evidence, infrastructure hardening, and access reviews</li> <li>Operate comfortably within a multi-entity environment (RZR/Skillz/Firy/Beamable shared IT) with comfort in M&amp;A-flavored ambiguity</li> </ul> <h2>Required Skills and Experience</h2> <h3>Must-Have</h3> <ul> <li>6–8 years in infrastructure or data center operations with 2+ years managing engineers — this role takes over a functioning global team on day one</li> <li>Bare-metal and colo depth: capacity planning, hardware procurement (Dell/Supermicro), IBX/remote-hands workflows, and the physical logistics of running owned cages</li> <li>Network fundamentals at scale: spine-leaf architecture, BGP/peering (100G-class), transit blends, and low-latency tuning (NIC/IRQ, packets-per-second thinking)</li> <li>Deep Linux operations: systemd, netplan, FreeIPA/Chrony, Ansible and/or Salt, Zabbix, running fleets of hundreds-plus servers</li> <li>Experience operating large stateful distributed systems — Aerospike, Cassandra, Scylla, Kafka, or ClickHouse — under sub-50ms latency budgets and hard capacity limits</li> <li>Demonstrated P1/P2 incident ownership: on-call program management, postmortems, and alert hygiene discipline</li> </ul> <h3>Nice-to-Have</h3> <ul> <li>Hybrid cloud experience alongside owned metal: AWS (IAM, Route 53, GuardDuty, S3); Kubernetes exposure a plus</li> <li>SOC 2 or compliance evidence experience; Okta and Vanta familiarity; security-minded infrastructure approach</li> <li>Experience in adtech, RTB, or other high-QPS, latency-sensitive environments</li> <li>Netris or other SDN controller experience; MAAS provisioning familiarity</li> </ul> <h2>Work Setup</h2> <p>This is a remote role open to candidates based in the United States. The role requires periodic travel to our data center sites (Santa Clara, CA; Ashburn, VA; Amsterdam; Hong Kong) and SF HQ for operational reviews, team time, and site work.</p> <h2>Why Join RZR?</h2> <ul> <li><strong>Own a genuinely rare infrastructure environment</strong> — four global owned-and-operated data centers, 5–6M+ QPS real-time bidding at ~20ms. This is infrastructure that is the company's competitive moat, running 4–10x faster bid response than cloud DSPs. You will not find this kind of physical infrastructure problem at most companies.</li> <li><strong>Full-stack ownership with no cloud-bill anxiety</strong> — real hardware decisions, GPU expansion for on-prem ML, and an annual cloud-vs-colo evaluation you will help drive. Zero marginal experimentation cost.</li> <li><strong>Inherit a functioning, experienced global team</strong> — regional DC owners with clear ownership and an established ops cadence. Build on it, not rescue it.</li> <li><strong>Direct line to leadership</strong> — reporting to the Head of Cybersecurity &amp; Infrastructure with visibility to the SVP of Engineering. Your goals map straight to company OKRs.</li> <li><strong>Company momentum</strong> — RZR rebranded in March 2026 and is expanding aggressively across mobile, CTV, and influencer. Your infrastructure is what makes all of it possible.</li> </ul> <h2>RZR Behaviors</h2> <p>RZR operates by eight core behaviors: Extreme Ownership · Move Fast · Drive for Excellence · Proactive Communication · Courage · Curiosity · Deliver Results · Manage Ambiguity</p>