Senior Director - Network Engineering

About the role

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU. If you'd like to build the world's best AI cloud, join us. *Note: This position requires presence in our Bellevue or San Francisco office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work from home day is currently Tuesday. Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU. Our vision is bold and is not an incremental exercise. We will continually re-evaluate and reinvent our current ways of working and the automation underneath all of it, while operating the existing network flawlessly for all customer workloads. Lambda has 10x'd over the last three years, and the network engineering organization is scaling to match. We're looking for a Senior Director of Network Engineering to lead one or more teams designing and building Lambda;’s global Cloud & AI networks. In this role you own the network itself — security, performance, availability and cost of the network as well as ensuring our AI datacenter builds deliver on time. We're looking for an experienced leader of leaders to own high impact outcomes end to end — and to build the organization that delivers it. In this role you will also get to partner with our product teams to ensure we exceed our customers' connectivity needs. You'll hire and grow a talented team of AI enabled software & network engineers, who will partner deeply with other network software and product teams to shape team culture, and stay ahead of our scale ambitions. This role will report to the VP of Cloud and AI Networking, working alongside a highly capable and passionate team of engineers. If you'd like to join a great team of customer obsessed engineers building the world's best AI cloud, come join us. What You'll Do - Own the architecture of Lambda's global network — GPU fabrics, data center fabrics, backbone, and internet edge — along with its security, performance, and availability - Build multi-year roadmaps for network architecture, data center fabrics, and cloud connectivity, and keep capacity ahead of demand - Set the strategy for our internet presence: peering, transit, IX footprint, and backbone traffic engineering - Partner with security, product, and executive leaders to align the network roadmap with business goals - Own network readiness for every AI data center build including management, site turn-up, and validation — so capacity lands on schedule - Own the network operating and capital budgets (OpEx and CapEx) and driving cost per [GPU/port/Gbps] down as we scale - Own 24/7 global network operations: uptime, latency, and jitter targets, on-call health, incident response, and blameless postmortems that change how we build - Establish the telemetry and monitoring architecture that lets us find and mitigate risk proactively rather than reactively - Drive an automation-first engineering culture built on Infrastructure-as-Code pipelines, declarative configuration management, and version-controlled automated testing - Own company-level goals for network security posture, network health, and traffic engineering capability - Partner with the CISO organization to embed secure-by-design segmentation, zero-trust edge patterns, and SASE frameworks across every layer - Lead multi-disciplinary network and software engineering teams, and hire, develop, and retain the engineers and the leaders who manage them - Manage through leads and senior ICs, developing both — regular 1:1s, clear performance feedback, growth planning, and sponsorship of meaningful work - Partner with Principal Engineers and technical leadership to hold a high engineering bar across design, operational reliability, and change safety - Represent your org's work and technical direction to senior leadership, and to enterprise customers and partners where appropriate You - Have 8+ years designing and operating highly available, large-scale networks for cloud infrastructure or enterprise network architecture, including leading network engineering teams and 2+ years managing managers - Bring deep expertise across data center and cloud networking — BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, Clos and spine-leaf fabrics, software-defined networking, and traffic engineering — plus zero-trust security, network automation, and cloud platforms such as AWS or OCI - Have designed or operated high-performance fabrics at scale (internet, backbone, RoCEv2 or InfiniBand) - Have a proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations that deliver mission-critical, high-performance cloud connectivity at scale - Have owned network capital and operating budgets, and can negotiate with and manage hardware, optics, transit, and colocation vendors - Foster a data-driven, automation-first, AI-enabled, high-velocity organization - Translate ambiguous business and product goals into clear team priorities and executable engineering plans - Show strong judgment about when to go deep technically, when to delegate, and when to escalate - Have a track record of project and product delivery in fast-paced, high-pressure environments - Communicate excellently in writing and in person — you use high-quality written artifacts to drive high-quality decisions and to get alignment on problems and solutions - Hold a BS or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or have equivalent practical experience Nice to Have - Experience in GPU cloud, HPC, or AI/ML infrastructure environments - Deep familiarity with large-scale data center build-out — fabric deployment, structured cabling and optics, commissioning, capacity modeling, or network supply chain - Experience running peering and transit strategy for a global network, including IX presence, ASN and IP address management, and DWDM or dark-fiber backbone - Hands-on depth with the platforms our teams use: [Arista / Juniper / Cisco / NVIDIA Spectrum-X and Quantum / SONiC or white-box], Terraform, Ansible, and streaming telemetry (gNMI/OpenConfig) - Experience taking a network through SOC 2, ISO 27001, or FedRAMP, or meeting data-sovereignty requirements across regions - Prior experience at a high-growth infrastructure or cloud company Salary Range Information The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description. About Lambda - Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast - Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove - We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG - Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers - We offer generous cash & equity compensation - Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents - Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles - 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees) - Flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use Equal Opportunity Employer Lambda is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.