Sagar Kandel
Network & Systems Engineer
5+ years engineering enterprise infrastructure at the intersection of high-performance networking and VFX production. 100 Gbps fabrics, dark fibre, ISP-level BGP, Proxmox clusters, and self-hosted AI — the systems that keep studios running.
About
Engineering infrastructure
that never sleeps
From Nepal to Melbourne to Sydney — 5+ years building the networks and systems that power award-winning VFX production at Blockhead VFX.
Sagar Kandel
Network & Systems Engineer
Enterprise & ISP Networking
BGP, OSPF, dark fibre, CWDM/DWDM multiplexing, direct leased lines, cross-connects, and full L2 provider management.
Security & Firewall Engineering
Fortigate HA clusters, deep packet inspection, IPS/IDS, IPsec site-to-site VPN, SSL VPN, and zero-trust network access.
Datacenter & Hypervisor Infrastructure
Proxmox VE clustering, Hyper-V, Ceph distributed storage, live migration, and HA at datacenter scale.
Storage & NAS Engineering
TrueNAS SCALE, ZFS pool design, RAIDZ2, snapshot replication, iSCSI/NFS/SMB for VFX render pipelines.
Containerisation & Self-Hosted AI
Docker, Portainer, Ollama and vLLM on bare-metal GPU nodes — AI inference without cloud API dependency.
VFX Pipeline & Studio Systems
AYON pipeline, NIM Studio Management, RMM tooling, and endpoint management across Windows/Linux/macOS fleets.
Experience
Career journey
Senior Systems & Network Engineer
Current- ▸Designed and operate a 100 Gbps studio network backbone — spine-leaf architecture serving render farms, on-set DIT, and remote production pipelines simultaneously.
- ▸Engineered dark fibre WAN links with CWDM/DWDM wavelength multiplexing between studio facilities, eliminating ISP dependency for inter-site traffic.
- ▸Advanced BGP and OSPF-wrapped BGP at ISP interconnect level — full routing table management, route policy, AS-path manipulation, and community tagging.
- ▸Built and maintain Fortigate firewall estate — design, deployment, active-passive HA clustering, DPI policies, SSL VPN and IPsec site-to-site tunnels.
- ▸Proxmox VE hypervisor clusters — HA node configuration, live migration, Ceph distributed storage integration across compute and storage nodes.
- ▸TrueNAS SCALE NAS infrastructure — RAIDZ2 ZFS pool design, replication policies, multi-protocol serving (iSCSI, NFS, SMB) for render workloads.
- ▸Self-hosted AI inference: Ollama and vLLM on local GPU nodes for internal LLM tooling, cutting external API reliance completely.
- ▸AYON pipeline and NIM Studio Management alongside RMM-based endpoint management across Windows, Linux, and macOS fleets.
Bachelor of Information Technology
- ▸Majored in Network and System Computing with strong academic performance across networking, security, and systems administration subjects.
- ▸Capstone project: designed a high-availability network architecture for media production environments — grade: Distinction.
- ▸Built deep foundations in routing protocols, enterprise network design, Linux systems administration, and software development.
Technical Skills
Built across years of
real infrastructure work
Network Engineering
Systems & Virtualisation
Cloud, AI & Automation
Tools & Technologies
Networking
Virtualisation
Storage
Containers & DevOps
AI & Monitoring
VFX & Studio
Certifications & Education
AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Associate · SAA-C03
Amazon Web Services
Bachelor of Information Technology
Network & System Computing
Victoria University, Melbourne
Projects & Infrastructure
What I've built
100 Gbps VFX Studio Network Fabric
Designed and operate a full spine-leaf 100 GbE switching fabric — concurrent render farm traffic, on-set DIT feeds, and inter-facility WAN with LACP bonding, ECMP load balancing, and sub-millisecond failover. Serves hundreds of artists across multiple concurrent productions.
Dark Fibre WAN with CWDM/DWDM Multiplexing
Multi-site dark fibre connectivity using CWDM wavelength multiplexing — dedicated 10G/100G inter-site bandwidth completely off ISP infrastructure, with optical monitoring and wavelength-level fault isolation. Eliminated all inter-site ISP costs and latency.
ISP-Level BGP & Leased Line Architecture
Full BGP peering at ISP interconnect points — full routing table management, route policy, AS-path manipulation, and community tagging. Cross-connect and direct leased line (DCC) provisioning end-to-end for studio WAN connectivity.
Other notable work
Fortigate HA Firewall Estate
Proxmox VE Hypervisor Cluster
TrueNAS SCALE Production Storage
Self-Hosted LLM Inference Stack
AYON + NIM VFX Pipeline
Contact
Let's work together
Open to new opportunities, collaborations, or just a conversation about enterprise networking and infrastructure.
GitHub
github.com/SagarKandelLocation
Sydney, Australia (AEST)
Currently open to senior network engineering, infrastructure, or systems roles in Sydney or remote — happy to discuss opportunities.