Engineering Manager - Software Defined Networking

Overview

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, builds Gigawatt-scale AI Factories for Training and Inference. Lambda’s mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give every person access to artificial intelligence. One person, one GPU.

If you'd like to build the world's best deep learning cloud, join us.

Note : This position requires presence in our San Francisco / San Jose or Seattle office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.

What You’ll Do

Lead our world-class Software Defined Networking team.

Lead both internal and customer facing projects in order to expand the capabilities of our multi-tenant, high-performance software-defined network.

Work closely with peer Managers in the Networking, Control Plane, and HPC Architecture teams to set our future vision for software defined networking.

Ensure our customers have the best possible experience that meets their performance, feature, and reliability requirements.

Manage both operational and development workloads, ensuring rigorous SLAs while also investing in automation and platform improvements to accelerate future growth.

Own and assist with product-focused projects and strategies that keep Lambda at the cutting edge of GPU hosting, making us the best place to run any GPU, ML or AI workloads.

Hire, grow and retain top-tier engineers, focusing on both systems reliability engineering and software engineering.

Shape a culture of sustainable, empathetic, and high-velocity engineering, with a deep focus on cross-team collaboration, documentation, and data-driven decision-making.

You

6+ years in full-time engineering management roles at a hyperscalar / cloud, networking solutions provider, technology company dependent on on-prem data-center networking, or a networking software company where you led networking or networking-adjacent teams.

10+ years of industry experience in software engineering, with a focus on deploying networking, distributed systems engineering, and / or software-defined networking.

Design and implementation of networking control planes and data planes, Development and tuning of traffic engineering, routing protocols (e.g., BGP, OSPF), VPNs, load balancers, and distributed firewalls, Proficient in low-level Linux networking, network namespaces, iptables, eBPF, and DPDK

Proven record of leading and building engineering teams that work on mission-critical, high performance networking infrastructure and distributed-systems orchestration.

Demonstrated operational excellence in running production-grade networking infrastructure with 99.99%+ availability SLAs, Defining SLIs and SLOs, Incident management under high-pressure scenarios, Postmortem and root cause analysis, Implementation of observability pipelines (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.)

Experience deploying and operating next-generation networking technologies in High-performance computing (HPC) and AI datacenters, Edge environments with strict latency and jitter constraints, Private cloud stacks such as OpenStack Neutron, Open vSwitch (OvS), Open Virtual Network (OVN) for Open vSwitch, or other Software Defined Networking software stacks like Nutanix, or VMware NSX

Exceptional leadership skills that encompass leading by trust, building empathy with your reports and other teams, and maintaining a sustainable but rapid velocity.

Strong customer-facing skills, including pre-sales, general support, and incident management.

Expertise with Kubernetes and container networking stacks like CNI plugins (Calico, Cilium, Flannel), Service mesh implementations (Istio, Linkerd), Ingress controllers, multi-tenant network policies, and network security enforcement.

Demonstrated expertise in managing long-term projects alongside urgent, short-term priorities and incident resolution.

Extensive experience collaborating with product, sales, and other engineering teams to build cohesive products with a focus on user experience and reliability.

Nice to Have

Experience with cutting edge networking technologies, specifically programmable superNICs, such as the Nvidia BlueField DPUs.

Experience with Nvidia Spectrum-X networking platform.

Experience with deploying networking solutions on Kubernetes.

Experience with implementing robust networking observability solutions.

Experience managing a remote, globally-distributed team.

Significant experience providing input into sales, customer service / success, and customer support functions.

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, ~400 employees (2025) and growing fast

We offer generous cash & equity compensation

Our investors include Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, US Innovative Technology, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, Crescent Cove.

We are experiencing extremely high demand for our systems, with quarter over quarter, year over year profitability

Our research papers have been accepted into top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG

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

A Final Note

You do not need to match all of the listed expectations to apply for this position. We are committed to building a team with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills.

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.

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