Senior Director - Network Software Services

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 Software Services to lead one or more teams building the software that enables Lambda to run a secure, performant and available AI Cloud at massive scale. 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. You'll hire and grow a talented team of AI enabled software engineers, who will partner deeply with network engineering 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 networking services that deliver our network monitoring, security, performance, and availability goals

• Own the architecture and operational excellence of large-scale distributed network systems, control planes, and data paths

• Own company-level goals: programmatically improving our security posture, observability of network health, internet and backbone traffic engineering capability, and more

• Set the multi-year technical strategy for network software services so it scales ahead of demand

• Hire, develop, and retain engineers and the leaders who manage them, and design the team structure as the org grows

• Manage through leads and senior ICs, developing both — regular 1:1s, clear performance feedback, growth planning, and sponsorship of meaningful work

• Partner deeply with network engineering, operations, capacity, and product teams to build services that improve the quality of Lambda connectivity

• Set the operational bar for your org: SLOs, on-call health, incident response, and blameless postmortems that change how we build

• Contribute to org-wide engineering process improvements — how we plan, how we ship better code, and how we learn from incidents

• Partner with Principal Engineers and technical leadership to hold a high engineering bar across design, code quality, and operational reliability

• Represent your org's work and technical direction to senior leadership, and to enterprise customers and partners where appropriate

You

• Have 8+ years building highly available, large-scale distributed systems for cloud infrastructure or enterprise network architecture, including 5+ years leading software engineering teams and 2+ years managing managers

• Have a software engineering background — you've shipped production systems and can engage credibly on architecture, technical tradeoffs, and code quality

• Bring deep expertise across networking protocols and data-center/cloud networking (BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, software-defined networking, traffic engineering), zero-trust security, CI/CD automation, and cloud platforms such as AWS or OCI

• Have a proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations that deliver mission-critical, high-performance cloud connectivity at scale

• 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 or cloud networking — fabric build-out, capacity modelling, or network supply chain

• Familiarity with networking fundamentals and configuration management is highly desirable.

• 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.