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Lambda is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers, from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. The company's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone access to superintelligence.
Lambda is seeking a Senior Director of Network Engineering to lead one or more teams designing and building Lambda's global Cloud & AI networks. This is a high-impact leadership role reporting to the VP of Cloud and AI Networking.
In this role, you will own the network itself—security, performance, availability, and cost—while ensuring AI datacenter builds deliver on schedule. You will architect Lambda's global network including GPU fabrics, data center fabrics, backbone, and internet edge. Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the architecture and strategy for Lambda's global network infrastructure, including multi-year roadmaps for network architecture, data center fabrics, and cloud connectivity
- Setting strategy for internet presence: peering, transit, IX footprint, and backbone traffic engineering
- Owning network readiness for every AI data center build, including management, site turn-up, and validation
- Managing network operating and capital budgets (OpEx and CapEx) and driving cost efficiency as the company scales
- Owning 24/7 global network operations: uptime, latency, jitter targets, on-call health, incident response, and blameless postmortems
- Establishing telemetry and monitoring architecture for proactive risk mitigation
- Driving an automation-first engineering culture built on Infrastructure-as-Code, declarative configuration management, and version-controlled testing
- Owning company-level goals for network security posture, network health, and traffic engineering capability
- Partnering with the CISO organization to embed secure-by-design segmentation, zero-trust edge patterns, and SASE frameworks
- Leading multi-disciplinary network and software engineering teams; hiring, developing, and retaining engineers and engineering leaders
- Managing through leads and senior individual contributors with regular 1:1s, performance feedback, growth planning, and sponsorship
- Representing your organization's work and technical direction to senior leadership, enterprise customers, and partners
You will partner with product teams to ensure Lambda exceeds customers' connectivity needs and work alongside a highly capable team of customer-obsessed engineers.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years designing and operating highly available, large-scale networks for cloud infrastructure or enterprise network architecture, including leading network engineering teams
- 2+ years managing managers
- Deep expertise across data center and cloud networking: BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, Clos and spine-leaf fabrics, software-defined networking, traffic engineering, zero-trust security, network automation, and cloud platforms (AWS or OCI)
- Experience designing or operating high-performance fabrics at scale (internet, backbone, RoCEv2, or InfiniBand)
- Proven track record building and scaling engineering organizations that deliver mission-critical, high-performance cloud connectivity at scale
- Experience owning network capital and operating budgets; ability to negotiate with and manage hardware, optics, transit, and colocation vendors
- Ability to foster a data-driven, automation-first, AI-enabled, high-velocity organization
- Ability to translate ambiguous business and product goals into clear team priorities and executable engineering plans
- Strong judgment about when to go deep technically, when to delegate, and when to escalate
- Track record of project and product delivery in fast-paced, high-pressure environments
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to use high-quality written artifacts to drive decisions and alignment
- BS or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field, or 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, optics, commissioning, capacity modeling, network supply chain)
- Experience running peering and transit strategy for a global network (IX presence, ASN and IP address management, DWDM or dark-fiber backbone)
- Hands-on depth with Arista, Juniper, Cisco, NVIDIA Spectrum-X and Quantum, SONiC or white-box platforms; Terraform, Ansible, and streaming telemetry (gNMI/OpenConfig)
- Experience taking a network through SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, or meeting data-sovereignty requirements across regions
- Prior experience at a high-growth infrastructure or cloud company
