Senior Staff Network Engineer

Lambda; Bellevue (KY); On-site; USD 190,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Lambda is seeking a Senior Staff Network Engineer to design and scale a global AI network. You will own end-to-end architectures, drive major projects, and mentor engineers across teams.

The role emphasizes deep data-center network expertise, automation, and collaboration with hardware, platform and product teams to ensure high availability and performance.

Qualifications

• Led large production-scale networking projects across multiple teams.
• Deep expertise in data center, backbone and internet protocols.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of major network areas end-to-end and drive production readiness.
• Lead large networking projects from design through delivery and turn-up.
• Develop designs and RFCs; guide reviews and set design standards.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar through reviews and hiring.

Skills

Network design

Data center networking

Automation (Python, Ansible, Jinja)

Linux networking

Vendor hardware (Arista, Juniper,Cisco

Telemetry & observability

Tools

Git

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.

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.

You will be joining a team of software, hardware and network engineers building one of the largest AI training and inference networks in the world. Lambda has 10x’d over the last three years and the network has to keep pace.

As a Senior Staff Network Engineer you’ll have the opportunity to be across all aspects of the network, including industry leading backend, frontend, backbone and edge networks. You will lead the projects that design, build and scale it. You are the engineer the team routes its hardest problems to, and the one whose designs other engineers follow.

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 our Senior Network Engineering leader and will work alongside an existing, highly capable team of network engineers.

What You’ll Do

• Own the architecture of major areas of Lambda’s network end to end — you make the design calls, you help build it, and you’re connected to how they hold up in production

• Lead large networking projects that may span multiple teams, from design through build to turn-up, and drive them to completion

• Write the designs, RFCs and reviews other engineers build from, and hold the bar in design review for work across the team

• Be the deep technical escalation point for the hardest production problems — the packet path, the routing table, the vendor’s firmware, the code

• Drive the automation of your domain, replacing manual operational work with software that holds up under scale

• Partner with hardware, platform and product teams to resolve technical questions that cross team boundaries

• Qualify and integrate new network hardware and software, and hold vendors to account on defects and roadmap

• Guide partner teams to automate and scale through robust software systems and services

• Guide partner teams build the right telemetry and automation to ensure our network health is observable and self healing

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and raise the bar through design review, code review and hiring

• Contribute to the multi-year technical strategy for Lambda’s network, and own the parts of it that fall in your area

• Work with internal and external customers to resolve network related issues

• 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

You

• Have owned the technical direction of a significant area of a production network — you can walk us through a design you made, why, what it cost, and what you’d change

• Have led large production-scale networking projects across multiple teams, from design through delivery

• Expert in large network designs to achieve maximum availability and performance

• Deep expertise in data center, backbone and internet protocols and technology

• Experience building and tuning networks for low latency, fast convergence and high availability

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

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

• Strong automation skills (Python, Ansible, Jinja), network APIs, and git or similar source control

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

• Have raised the technical bar of engineers around you through mentorship and design review

• 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

• Have knowledge or experience maintaining Software Defined Networks (SDN)

• Experience automating network configuration

• Hands-on with HPC/AI networking: RoCEv2 and/or InfiniBand (Congestion Control, VLs, partitions), GPUDirect RDMA concepts.

• Experience with DWDM technologies and SD-WAN

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.