Principal Network Engineer

Lambda•Bellevue, WA

1d•$372,000 - $550,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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 Haves

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

Responsibilities

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.