Survival Networking: What I Learned About Resilience at Scale from FAANG

Lessons from a Career in Big Tech Infrastructure

For many network engineers, working at a FAANG company might be a career milestone, a signal that you've stepped into the deep end of complexity, velocity, and scale. But what most people don’t see is what it actually takes to build and operate networks at this level, where terabits per second are the baseline, not the ceiling, and where a single failure can cause disruptions across continents.

To begin with, this post doesn't focus on titles or prestige. Instead, it approaches the engineering mindset shift that happens when you move from traditional enterprise environments into hyperscale infrastructure. I’m sharing hard-earned lessons from years of designing and operating fault-tolerant, self-healing, globally distributed networks, the kind that power billion-user platforms.

We'll explore real scenarios that expose the limits of device-level redundancy, the importance of blast radius engineering, the hidden fragility of optical layers, and the operational discipline required to survive multi-terabit failures. These insights aren’t theoretical. They come from on-call rotations, outage reviews, chaos drills, and architecture boardrooms.

If you're a network engineer aiming to grow into the world of hyperscale, this is the reality you need to be ready for and the opportunity it represents.

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