Senior Director - Network Engineering

Lambda•Bellevue, WA

8d•$399,000 - $531,000•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. 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 Engineering to lead one or more teams designing and building Lambda;’s global Cloud & AI networks. In this role you own the network itself — security, performance, availability and cost of the network as well as ensuring our AI datacenter builds deliver on time. 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. In this role you will also get to partner with our product teams to ensure we exceed our customers' connectivity needs. You'll hire and grow a talented team of AI enabled software & network engineers, who will partner deeply with other network software 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.

Requirements

Have 8+ years designing and operating highly available, large-scale networks for cloud infrastructure or enterprise network architecture, including leading network engineering teams and 2+ years managing managers
Bring deep expertise across data center and cloud networking — BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, Clos and spine-leaf fabrics, software-defined networking, and traffic engineering — plus zero-trust security, network automation, and cloud platforms such as AWS or OCI
Have designed or operated high-performance fabrics at scale (internet, backbone, RoCEv2 or InfiniBand)
Have a proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations that deliver mission-critical, high-performance cloud connectivity at scale
Have owned network capital and operating budgets, and can negotiate with and manage hardware, optics, transit, and colocation vendors
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 Haves

Experience in GPU cloud, HPC, or AI/ML infrastructure environments
Deep familiarity with large-scale data center build-out — fabric deployment, structured cabling and optics, commissioning, capacity modeling, or network supply chain
Experience running peering and transit strategy for a global network, including IX presence, ASN and IP address management, and DWDM or dark-fiber backbone
Hands-on depth with the platforms our teams use: [Arista / Juniper / Cisco / NVIDIA Spectrum-X and Quantum / SONiC or white-box], Terraform, Ansible, and streaming telemetry (gNMI/OpenConfig)
Experience taking a network through SOC 2, ISO 27001, or FedRAMP, or meeting data-sovereignty requirements across regions
Prior experience at a high-growth infrastructure or cloud company

Responsibilities

Own the architecture of Lambda's global network — GPU fabrics, data center fabrics, backbone, and internet edge — along with its security, performance, and availability
Build multi-year roadmaps for network architecture, data center fabrics, and cloud connectivity, and keep capacity ahead of demand
Set the strategy for our internet presence: peering, transit, IX footprint, and backbone traffic engineering
Partner with security, product, and executive leaders to align the network roadmap with business goals
Own network readiness for every AI data center build including management, site turn-up, and validation — so capacity lands on schedule
Own the network operating and capital budgets (OpEx and CapEx) and driving cost per [GPU/port/Gbps] down as we scale
Own 24/7 global network operations: uptime, latency, and jitter targets, on-call health, incident response, and blameless postmortems that change how we build
Establish the telemetry and monitoring architecture that lets us find and mitigate risk proactively rather than reactively
Drive an automation-first engineering culture built on Infrastructure-as-Code pipelines, declarative configuration management, and version-controlled automated testing
Own company-level goals for network security posture, network health, and traffic engineering capability
Partner with the CISO organization to embed secure-by-design segmentation, zero-trust edge patterns, and SASE frameworks across every layer
Lead multi-disciplinary network and software engineering teams, and hire, develop, and retain the engineers and the leaders who manage them
Manage through leads and senior ICs, developing both — regular 1:1s, clear performance feedback, growth planning, and sponsorship of meaningful work
Partner with Principal Engineers and technical leadership to hold a high engineering bar across design, operational reliability, and change safety
Represent your org's work and technical direction to senior leadership, and to enterprise customers and partners where appropriate