Principal Network Engineer

Socket.dev; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Wellness stipend

401k match

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Lambda is seeking a senior network architect to own the multi-year strategy for our global cloud network, including fabric, backbone, and edge. You will shape technical direction, mentor engineers, and work with enterprise customers on critical projects.

The role requires hands-on depth, collaboration across hardware, software, and product teams, and participation in day‑2 operations and on‑call rotations to ensure peak availability.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in cloud computing, systems engineering, and large-scale network infra.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year network strategy for fabric, backbone and edge.
• Set technical direction and standards for engineers.
• Manage high-level enterprise customer relationships on mission-critical projects.
• Lead cross-team collaboration and make high-quality technical judgments.

Skills

Multi-year strategy

Technical leadership

Enterprise networks

SDN and cloud networking

Mentorship

On-call rotation

Vendor/DC networking

Python scripting

Tools

Datadog

Grafana

Prometheus

gNMI

OpenTelemetry

Terraform

Ansible

Salt

NetBox

Job description

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.

You will be joining a team of highly capable software, hardware and network engineers building one of the largest AI training and inference networks in the world. You'll collaborate with people across Lambda to deliver novel and inventive solutions that meet the highest standards for safety, security, availability and performance - at the lowest possible cost for our customers. You will experience an inclusive and inventive culture that welcomes bold ideas and empowers you to own them from concept to production. Our vision is bold and is not an incremental exercise. We will continually re-evaluate and reinvent our current fabric topology, routing design and the automation underneath all of it, while operating the existing network flawlessly for all customer workloads.

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 multi-year technical strategy for Lambda's network — fabric, backbone and edge — and everything in between.

• Set the technical direction and standards other engineers design, build and operate against.

• Own high-level technical relationships with enterprise customers, guiding mission-critical projects

• Adept at influencing without authority across teams, and applying high quality technical judgment under ambiguity.

• Resolve any technical ambiguity that spans organisational boundaries — between network, hardware, platform and product teams

• Go deep when the hardest problems demand it — into the packet path, the routing table, the vendor's firmware, the code. You are hands-on.

• Drive the technical work end to end: shape the vision, define high- and low-level design, then work alongside the teams delivering it

• Raise the bar of the engineers around you through mentorship, design review and hiring

• Operate what you build. You'll take part in day 2 operations and the on-call rotation, because the fastest feedback loop between design and reality runs through the pager

• Serve as the senior technical voice with our largest customers on mission-critical projects, and carry what you learn there back into Lambda's roadmap

• Identify new opportunities to delight our customers, like novel new ways to improve availability or performance or even developing new products.

You

• 8+ years in relevant domains like cloud computing, systems engineering, and large-scale network infrastructure

• Experience of design, build and operation of production large scale Data Center or Cloud networks

• Experience of design, build and operation of software defined networking services and how to build distributed systems to the highest level of availability

• Have led through the implementation of large production-scale networking projects

• Experience building distributed network systems and services at scale

• Have experience with cloud providers networking (such as AWS, GCP, OCI)

• Deep expertise in datacenter, backbone and internet protocols and technology

• Experience building and optimizing networks for the best possible customer experience (lowest latency, fastest convergence, most available networks)

• Are comfortable on the Linux command line, and have an understanding of the Linux networking stack and internals

• Production automation skills in Python and a configuration management tool, working with network APIs and source control

• Production experience with multiple network gear vendors (Arista, Juniper, Cisco, Cumulus/SONiC, Opengear)

• Experience with Networking Monitoring stacks (Datadog, Clickhouse, Grafana, Prometheus, gNMI, OTel)

• Excellent communicator both written and verbal. You leverage high quality written artifacts to inform high quality decision making and get approval on problems and solution opportunities

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with HPC/AI networking: RoCEv2 and/or InfiniBand (congestion control, virtual lanes, partitions), GPUDirect RDMA, and the behaviour of collective communication at scale

• Experience with the network characteristics of large distributed training workloads

• Experience building distributed network systems and services at scale

• Experience with public cloud provider networking (AWS, GCP, OCI) and automating network configuration within it, using tools like Terraform, Ansible or Salt

• Experience with software defined networking

• Familiarity with modern network monitoring and telemetry — Prometheus, Grafana, gNMI, OpenTelemetry, or equivalents

• Experience with source-of-truth and IPAM tooling such as Netbox

• Experience with DWDM and SD-WAN

• Understanding of data center power, space and cooling trade-offs and their impact on topology choices

• Experience with virtualization technology and with load balancers

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.